The Shadow
by Connie Nervegas
Summary: Leo inadvertently strikes a bargain with a mysterious being and must find a way to stop it before it claims one of his brothers.
1. Chapter 1

_I've been researching Jung archetypes and other things about the subconscious that scare me, so I thought I would force the boys to go through the same thing. I sort of want to write a scary story. It seems to be getting a little abstract towards the end, so don't think that I didn't notice. I'm not just losing it. Some of the weird imagery I'm using is from my own dreams because I'm the only expert on them._

He was so tired. He scowled as he scanned the nearby buildings from the rooftop where he was hidden in the shadow of a chimney. He felt his eyelids drooping and his eyes rolling into his head. He forced them to refocus.

Hamato Leonardo, the fearless warrior, the leader of the Hamato clan. He could cleave a board in two in one stroke, but he couldn't stay awake after 10pm without a nap. That was the exhaustion talking, he told himself, as he spotted what appeared to be a likely abandoned building. He had pushed himself too far, staying awake for nearly 36 hours and now he was paying the price. He knew that Raph slept in one of these buildings occasionally.

Why was he so far from home? He silently chided himself for his foolish attempt to… do what exactly? To prove to Raph that he could stay away from home just as long as he could? He had absolutely no desire to wander the world with no purpose. He shivered at the idea. Roaming the city day after day with no idea of where a meal or rest would come from. Leo thrived on rules and knowing what would happen next. It was the reason he and his family was alive.

He climbed silently down the fire escape and paused a second to find footing to jump to the next building. As he flew through the air, he wondered how Raph did it. Raph stayed away for days, even weeks at a time and the only thing that Leo knew about these excursions was that he slept in abandoned buildings and mooched off of low life mobsters who owed him money.

Leo climbed into the window of the building and paused, with both feet on the windowsill, as silent as if he weren't there at all. He couldn't sense any movement, but saw that there were definitely signs of habitation. There was an old mattress, what looked like a baby crib, and mounds of dirty clothes and plastic bags. He instantly leapt out the window and decided to try the next level. If it wasn't empty, then he would just have to sleep hidden on a rooftop. He hated sleeping in the open.

He thought twice and gathered some of the clothes and debris into his arms. There was enough trash on this level that he could hide and never be exposed. As he bent down for another armful of debris, he could sense movement out of the corner of his eye. He crouched down, reaching for a katana.

A toddler was sleeping in the crib. If there was a toddler, then there surely was an adult. Better leave now. Leo turned his back on the toddler and heard the crib rattling and the child whimpering. He looked around. No movement. Not even a stir. The level was abandoned, except for himself and the baby.

She stood up, holding on to the rail of her crib, looking around. He paused, drawn by the realization that the child had been left alone in this building. But maybe the child belonged to an adult who was only a level below and would come when they heard her cries. He couldn't take that chance and headed towards the window.

"Mommy, bottle," the toddler said.

He could at least find a bottle for the child, he thought. He spotted an old refrigerator plugged in across the room. The building was an old factory, with totally open floor space. No place to hide. It bothered him immensely as he made his way across the gaping space to the refrigerator. He paused behind a brick column to listen for footsteps, movement or breathing, but only heard the little girl saying, "Bottle, mommy. Milk."

The refrigerator was empty. He stared at the gaping abyss inside the fridge, smelling the musty smell inside, wondering what he should do. Leave. That's what he should do. The child was of no concern. He'd been out patrolling for the foot and she certainly didn't qualify as a foot ninja. He could ask April to call Child Protective Services, but that was it.

And then he found himself standing six feet away from the crib again, leaning against a column, watching her. She was whimpering loudly and making dramatic faces that made him smile. For some reason, it reminded him of Mikey.

Then she screamed and wailed. She sucked in as much breath as her little lungs would allow and exhaled a wail. He didn't turn to run, instead standing right in the front of the crib. She reached her fat little arms up to him, asking to be held and he obliged.

She was wet and warm. It wasn't a feeling that he was used to. She also smelled strongly of urine and he realized that there must be diapers around somewhere in the mess.

"Have bath?" she asked.

"No, I'm looking for a diaper," he told her unnecessarily.

She had stopped screaming, but was now hiccupping sadly against his plastron, watching him as he sifted through the paper, plastic and clothing with one hand and kicked the piles back and forth with his feet.

"Finally," he muttered to himself. There were a few clean diapers and a nearly empty box of wet wipes at the bottom of a pile of papers and books. He froze for a second when he spotted a syringe amongst the detritus that he had just sifted through and felt a bolt of panic in his chest. Had he touched it? Were there others? Had he touched any of those?

He didn't think so and gingerly lifted the diapers and wet wipes into his arms and looked about him for a clean place to put the child while he changed her diaper.

Change a diaper? He was having quite the adventure tonight. "Now I've never done this before," he said to the toddler as he placed her on her back on the mattress. "So don't judge."

He unfastened her Winnie the Pooh sleeper and then stared at the diaper, trying to assess its function. If only he'd had drills on diaper changing once in awhile in addition to his kata training. He laughed to himself at the vision his brothers in a line changing diapers while he blew a while, egging them on. He could see Don pointing at a chart of a diaper and explaining the history of diapering and the source of the materials used in its manufacture. He pictured Raph giving up in frustration and bouncing his baby analog off a wall. Mikey would probably give it name, build it a sling and take it for walks, just to disturb them all.

Then he remembered the task at hand. It felt a little wrong to see the naked body of some poor woman's child, but then he reminded himself that the mother didn't care enough to be here to do it herself and then mechanically tore off the old diaper. He had braced himself for the worst and it was the worst. He couldn't imagine anything worse anyway.

"Naked butt! Naked butt!" she said happily in a sing-song voice.

He worked quickly to make her clean and then tried to figure out where the tabs attached. He managed it after a failed attempt and snapped her back into the sleeper. She sat up, crawled towards him and put her arms around his neck.

"Up," she said.

Leo stood in the room cuddling the little girl, wondering what to do next. _Call home_, seemed to be the option that was winning out. He pulled out his cell phone. It was dead. He'd forgotten to recharge it. And he had just nagged Mikey about it when he left. "Never leave the lair without some form of communication!" he'd yelled down the empty sewer tunnel after Mikey's retreating shell. "I don't think you'll be able to find a carrier pigeon if you get into a bind!"

What next? Put the child in the crib and find a more secure place to sleep. But it didn't seem right to leave the little girl here alone with no food or parent in sight. He wondered if the fact that she was nuzzling her soft little head against his plastron was contributing to this newfound sense of responsibility.

He placed the toddler back in her crib and she reached out for a toy shaped like an ice cream cone and chewed on the end of the cone. As he straightened up, he spotted a baby book on the floor. It was stained and dirty. He opened it and read, "Miona Marie Golden."

"Miona, huh? That's an interesting name."

He opened the baby book and paged through, looking for pictures as he walked around the room. Nothing. No notes. Nothing. He paced, looking for more signs of habitation.

A leg. There was a human leg lying amongst the garbage about twenty feet in front of him. Female. He dropped into a defensive position as soon as his nerves registered the presence of another individual. But it wasn't moving. He crept up on the sleeping woman.

Not asleep. Her eyes were wide and staring at the ceiling, unblinking. Her chest was still. There wasn't much discoloration or smell, so he judged that she had just died. He spotted a pile of used syringes; what he assumed were the instruments of her death.

His first thought was that he wouldn't be disturbed and could sleep here safely, then a rush of guilt and anger at himself for such a heartless and opportunistic idea. He would have to call the police to remove the dead body and the toddler.

So she was an orphan now, assuming that her daddy wasn't around. His mind clouded over, demanding sleep. He decided that he could sleep a few hours to clear his head and then he would get up, go home and call the police. Surely, the little girl would be alright for a few more hours. She didn't look particularly malnourished.

She resumed her crying suddenly, screaming for a bottle and he instinctively picked her up, bounced and shushed her, and then went back to the fridge. It was as if he were in some kind of nightmarish cycle. The fridge was just as empty as it had been before, but he stared into it, willing it to fill with food.

He laid Miona back in the crib and then lay down. He was only asleep briefly when he heard her demanding milk. He picked her up, held her and stared hopelessly into the refrigerator again. Still nothing.

Maybe if he tried a third time and thought really hard. The mind was what really shaped reality, he thought as he deposited Miona back into the crib. He lay back down, but only momentarily. He automatically got up, and grabbed Miona, who was sucking on the wooden end of a nunchuck.

"I told them not leave these lying around," Leo said to himself as he threw it aside. He held the warm little girl against his plastron, wishing very hard that there would be milk and food in the refrigerator when he opened it.

He opened the door and saw the light flash on. There was a gallon of milk, eggs, vegetables and enough food to feed a family. There was even a filled bottle waiting to be used. She took the bottle and he sat on the mattress happily watching her as she sat in the crib, sucking noisily on the bottle while her eyelids drooped.

As soon his head his touched the mattress, he realized there was a sound near Miona's crib and it wasn't her. He sat up and at first saw nothing.

Then a moving shadow. He filled with dread. It was coming for her. That shadow was going to kill that baby. He knew it in his heart and that he couldn't do anything about it. Its presence stayed in the shadows that inexplicably filled the wide open space and he knew that something horrible would happen if it left the shadows. He would know more than he was supposed to. It moved slowly and almost humanlike. But not human. It was ancient and evil and very familiar. He wanted to look away.

It stood near the crib and Leo knew that it was reaching for Miona.

"Stop!" he said.

It did stop. Leo knew that he had never seen this thing before, but he knew it and what it would do and he knew that no one had ever spoken to it directly.

"Is this your child?" it asked. Its voice sounded thin and empty, as if coming from very far away. Not at all evil. Just devoid of anything.

"No, this child isn't mine. But I won't let you hurt her."

Miona was still asleep and didn't notice the shadow next to her crib.

The shadow moved slowly towards Leo. It moved with a jerky gait and he saw that its head was covered with a black cloth. Not a hood; just a cloth. "I want a child," it said. "Give me your child and I will give this one to you."

"Fine, go ahead," Leo said. He didn't have any children and never would. He felt a small surge of pride. He had tricked the devil.

But then he was filled with terror as the creature reached out a shadowy hand to pull the cloth off its head. He didn't want to see its face and knew he would die from the fear that was about to overtake him.

And then he found that he was lying on the mattress with Miona against his plastron. He was sweaty and breathing rather heavily. Her chubby little hand was wrapped around his finger. He picked her up and watched as her head lolled to the side when he sat up. Everything felt suddenly dull and rigid and real. He could smell the air and see the vastness of the room and the dead mother only feet away. The fridge was still empty. He stared into it with no particular feeling except mild disappointment.

He realized that it was time to go. Lying Miona in her crib again, he gave her a goodbye pat on the head and then disappeared out into the night. There was a payphone only three blocks away. Possibly the only payphone still working in the entire city.

"911 dispatch," said a bored woman's voice.

"I'd like to report an abandoned toddler in the old Walden Shoe Factory on the corner of 8th and Ludington," Leo said quickly into the phone. "I believe her mother died of a drug overdose. The toddler doesn't have any food, so you should hurry."

"Are you currently at the location?" the dispatcher asked as Leo hung up the phone and then found a place to hide, waiting to see the police bring a body bag and a toddler out of the building.


	2. Chapter 2

_I don't know where all the Jane Austen talk came from. Forgive me. I'm really enjoying Mikey's silly story. I hope the readers get a laugh out of it as well. Didn't expect the tone here to get so silly, but I kind of like it. I didn't really have that much to accomplish, so I just decided to let it go wherever it wanted to._

"It's called Dead Love!" Mikey yelled excitedly at Leo as soon as he walked in the door. He was waving a stack of fresh computer printouts in his face. "Raph came up with the title."

"Raph?" Leo asked, searching instinctually for his brother to demand an explanation of this bizarre occurrence.

He could hear the sound of Raph's fists making contact with his punching back. "Hey… I just read Pride and Prejudice and Zombies!" he wheezed out between hits. "That was my idea of a romance."

Mikey's face fell and his eyes grew enormous with disappointment. "Oh, he was making fun of me. Guess it makes sense now."

"Give it to me and I'll read it," Leo said bravely, taking the novella into his hands. He realized with a wince that the saccharin was almost dripping from the pages. "Did Raph and Don read it?"

"Raph did." Mikey had instantly rebounded.

"It was pretty good for a sappy sickening romance novel. You should keep writing about that ex-con who fights dogs so that he can pay his child support. I liked that one." Raph came out of the dojo wiping his sweaty face with a towel.

There was a flurry of typing from the direction of the lab and Leo stuck his head in the lab door. "You still alive in here?"

Don answered with a grunt. He turned to shield his experiment with his shell. That meant that it was both illegal and dangerous.

"Did you read Mikey's latest work in progress?"  
Don scoffed. "It's about early 19th century people falling in love right? I told you not to let him watch all that Jane Austen."

"Is there something wrong with Jane Austen, Donatello?" It was Master Splinter. He had crept up behind them both. He liked to do this sometimes, just to prove that he could.

"No, not really," Don said. Leo could tell that he was searching for a satisfactory explanation of his previous Austen-bashing. "Just that he's a boy, you know…"

"Well, I am male and I enjoy her works quite a bit," Splinter said, a teasing glint in his eye. "At least this story will have more dancing and less entrails than the last novel that he produced."

At least it isn't long, Leo thought, as he settled in on his bed to read Dead Love. He quickly learned that the story revolved around a girl named Aperire and her dashing beau Nemean Firehouse. A classic Mikey name. Nemean was unnaturally perfect. Always saying the right things, being supernaturally chivalrous and good looking at really odd times and, as Leo was beginning to find, obnoxiously right all the time. He kept waiting for the guy to be wrong just for the satisfaction of seeing him fail. But it hadn't happened so far.

The heroine Aperire was the only likeable character in the book. She hadn't needed to be rescued once and he liked her for that. He did wonder about her name though. He wasn't sure how it was pronounced and suspected that Mike had just made it up off the top of his head so that they would have to wonder about it.

She had an annoying scullery maid named Sanzio da Urbino who was supposed to be an immigrant from Italy. She spent most of her page time criticizing the other characters and getting into fist fights with the washer women who worked on Aperire's plantation.

Her father, the wise and seemingly all knowing Mr. Shard, seemed to be conveniently out of town whenever something happened where his advice would have been useful. Leo marked it in the margin of the page. Mikey enjoyed constructive criticism and Leo enjoyed reading their line comments to see the different reactions.

There was an evil alchemist who lived in a stone tower on the outskirts of the woods. He wanted to buy Aperire's plantation because it was over a nice deposit of some kind of alchemical substance. But he was evil. He rubbed his hands together and cackled malevolently whenever he was in a scene.

Then, after an epic ball, where Nemean and Aperire gazed longingly into each others' eyes for several pages, Nemean took off to fight in the Napoleonic wars, promising Aperire to love her forever and took a locket of her hair and made a big schmaltzy deal out of the whole thing. Leo thought he should just man up and tell her that he would probably die and she was free to move on.

But then, tragedy. When Aperire refused to sell her ancestral land to the alchemist, he burned the house down. Leo wondered what this was supposed to accomplish since in the early 1800's, Aperire wouldn't have had the right to sell Mr. Shard's property in the first place and burning down the building would not have transferred the property in any way.

But Aperire was desperate for money to rebuild the plantation and so she married a vagabond minstrel named Boxy Smith. Leo couldn't understand how this was supposed to solve her money problems since Boxy was even more broke than Aperire, but then it was revealed that Boxy had misrepresented his fortune to her in hopes of making money off of her non-existent dowry. And so Mr. Shard refused to let them out the marriage and then helpfully skipped off to France again for no reason, leaving her stuck in the burned out house.

The alchemist's plan was going as he had suspected. Aperire would be forced to sell the land because there was nowhere to live. All of the servants except that nasty Sanzio da Urbino had burned to death and she had been keeping them all alive by cooking the horses, and other meat, which everyone suspected was the coachman.

But then, just when she was about to sign the contract to sell the plantation, Nemean came limping bravely home. He realized that Boxy had married his woman, beat his chest on the charred front lawn of the plantation, and then gave all of his considerable worldly goods to Aperire to rebuild the plantation. His life was with her and without her, he had no life. So he told everyone that he was going to devote his life to God and become a monk. Then he rode majestically into the sunset.

Aperire and Boxy lived somewhat happily ever after. Mr. Shard came back from France, saw that the house had been rebuilt and then left for Switzerland. Sanzio da Urbino was sent back to Sicily to be court-martialed. The alchemist accidentally blew himself up somehow.

Leo finished the last page and drew a big question mark on the back. That was the most bizarre historical romance he'd ever read. It was a parody of us, he realized, laughing out loud. Then he stopped laughing when he realized that Nemean was the name of the lion that the Argonauts fought. Lion. Leo. He was the obnoxiously perfect hero. But he recovered when he realized that Sanzio da Urbino was the epithet of Raphael. He wondered if Raph had realized that he was the aggressive and possibly cannibalistic scullery maid. Probably not.

Mikey was playing a video game and Leo tossed the manuscript in his lap. Mikey paused the game and looked up at him expectantly. "What did you think?"

"It was funny. I liked that bit where Sanzio bit off the butler's thumb," Leo said, motioning his head towards Raph, who just happened to be washing dishes. Perfect timing.

Raph turned around to face them as he polished a frying pan with a dishtowel, oblivious of the joke. "Yeah, that was my favorite part too."

Leo and Mikey snickered together at the private joke.

* * *

"Leo, you awake?"

Leo ignored the voice for at least ten seconds. "No," he finally responded. He was too tired to register the person addressing him.

"I had a bad dream."

It was Mikey.

"Okay." Leo rolled over onto his other side. "I don't hear you leaving," he said.

"Can I sleep in here?"

Leo looked over at Don, who was snoring mildly on the other bed across the room. "If you can fit, I guess." Mikey immediately squeezed himself onto the already limited free space in Leo's bed. Their faces were only inches apart and Leo screwed his face up in annoyance. Mikey laughed. "Your breath stinks like garlic. What did you eat today?"

"Garlic bread."

"Well, that explains it."

"What did you dream about?" Maybe if he explained the dream and reassured him, then he would go back to his own bed. Why didn't he ever wake up Raph instead?

"I was looking for you and I couldn't find you," he said, in a small and unusually childlike voice. "I just wanted to come in here and make sure you were still around."

"Was I dead?"

"No, I just wanted you for some reason and you were gone. And I kept asking everybody where you were and they acted like they didn't know who you were. Don't worry, I'll be quiet now." Mikey actually was quiet for a few minutes and Leo was almost asleep when he heard, "Did you have any dreams yet?"

He fought off a flood of anger and the strong desire to shove him off the bed. "No, not yet. I had a funky dream last night, but I can't remember what it was really. Something to do with a fridge." Miona. The baby. He wondered what had happened to her.

"Huh," Mikey said, clearly not seeing the funky quality of a refrigerator. "Well, goodnight."  
He worried about Mikey in his last few seconds of consciousness. He knew he had bad dreams. They all did. Every sentient being on the planet had bad dreams, as far he knew. But he hadn't crawled into his bed for several years. He was too tired to wonder any more about it and fell asleep, dreaming vaguely that Raph was going to bite off his thumb.


	3. Chapter 3

_So this one is going to go to a pretty strange and abstract place. I hope everybody enjoys strange and abstract because I sure do. _

He could finally see himself for what he really was. A wolf with ragged patches of fur hanging off and the blood of his last victim in his mouth. He looked down at the animal, knowing its fate. There was no other way that it could end.

The woods had always been here and no matter how long the trees had been cut down, they were still there. The trunks were close together and the foliage high in the air, towering over him. Ferns and brush grew on the ground in a dark blue mist that blended with the starless night sky that he could see on the horizon. He looked for a light out there past the trees, but knew that it didn't exist. If it did, he would never reach it. The forest was as old as the beginning and he knew that he could see the truth of the past clearly here without the veneer of his life intruding.

There was no path in the brush on the ground and no life other than the woods. No sound. No birds. No animals. Only the thing behind him. He knew that the thing was following him. It was so easy for it find him here. There was nothing in the way between them. He turned around and saw a black mass. It crept on all fours, always hidden from view by the trees. Always on the outskirts of his vision and understanding.

There was no way to fight that thing. It was older than him and the woods and the only thing to do was run. So he turned around and moved as fast as he could through the trees away from it, feeling the exhilaration of panic as the creature pursued. He glided past the trees, making no sound and feeling no sensation but the movement. The thing was closer than ever and he looked on the horizon for some change. To see the trees part or a path to lead him away from here.

But he knew the end before the beginning. It was too fast for him to outrun. No matter what direction he turned it would follow. So he stopped, waiting for it to catch him, staring at the plants on the ground at his feet. Wasn't this the better way? After all, aren't we all born to die?

He lay down on the ground and turned over to see his pursuer and its blank eyes and smiling mouth as it crouched on top of him, crushing his body. The trees watched without any concern.

The creature bent down to sink its teeth into his neck and just before he felt the pain, he realized that this was the reason he had been made. To be devoured.

* * *

Raphael awoke. Not with a start. He just opened his eyes and saw Mikey lying in his bed with Mr. Bear tucked at his side. Where were his sais? Why didn't he fight that fucking thing? Oh, yeah. He'd been a wolf and didn't have opposable thumbs.

He closed his eyes and tried to block it out. What a stupid dream. There weren't any woods in New York besides Central Park.

But still, he couldn't explain away the shaking that had overtaken his limbs. He climbed out of bed and paced the room a few times to get his circulation moving again.

"What's that?" Mikey asked, his eyes barely open as he half sat up.

"Just me. Relax."

"No, it's out there."

Raph stopped moving and looked out the open bedroom door into the black of the living room. For a second he thought he saw the devouring creature from his dream, but then it was gone. Or was it? It still felt like something was there, just out of his eyesight.

"What is that?" Mikey asked, panic rising in his voice.

"Let me check," Raph said, grabbing his weapons from next to his bed. He had to will his body to move because everything else was telling him to hide. Don't look at it. Don't let it see you. "It's probably a raccoon," he said, more to himself than to Mikey. For some reason he shut the bedroom door. _What a great move for a specially trained ninja_, he thought. _Shut the door so you don't have to look at it._

Mikey cuddled down in his blankets, looking unconvinced. "I know it's still out there. Can't you hear it? It's talking to us."

Raph listened very hard. "I don't hear anything. Are you sure?"

Mike nodded. "Don't turn the lights off."

"This is stupid," Raph said, his fear mutating quickly into anger. He threw the bedroom door open, marched out of the bedroom door and turned on the living room lights. Just what he thought. Nothing.

"Can't you hear that?" Mikey called from the bedroom.

"What's it saying?" Raph assumed Mikey would say something like, "You've been punked!"

"It's saying something like, 'We were all born to die.'"

Raph's brain froze and looped over and over, jammed. "What did you say?"

Mikey sounded like he was repeating something on a radio with a low volume. "We were all born to do die. Lie down. It won't hurt. You knew this was coming."

Raph grabbed onto the back of a chair as his brain continued to loop, unable to process what he was hearing.

Mikey paused and then followed Raph into the living room. He sat in the chair that Raph was leaning against. "It just keeps going," he said. "Now it's saying, "You're a beast lost in the wilderness…"

"SHUT UP!"

Mikey's eyes widened with surprise. "Hey, it's creepy, but that's what it's saying. I wonder why you can't hear it. Let's take a radio in the bedroom. I won't sleep if this ghost babbles at me all night long."

Raph's face felt suddenly hot and he said, "You're doing this somehow, aren't you!"

"What?"

"You're trying to make me… Just forget it. I'm going to bed."

He didn't have any intention of sleeping.

They both lay in bed all night listening to the radio DJ asking callers for the best ways to pick up women in night clubs. But every once and a while Mikey would say, "Are you sure you can't hear it?"

_I hope that was creepy because it creeped me out and I'm the one who wrote it._


	4. Chapter 4

_The song they dance to is called "Runaway" by The Corrs. It had the most embarrassing lyrics of any song I could find that was still waltzable. So obviously I didn't write the song or anything._

Leonardo sat on the cold wet fire escape, spying through April's kitchen window. Raindrops fell on his head as he watched her do a one-sided waltz to a perky love song. After he thought he had watched long enough to give him material to tease, he rapped on the glass lightly. He realized how accustomed she must be to him and his brothers jumping in and out of her window because she didn't bat an eyelid when she heard the sound. He lifted up the window and leaped into the room.

"You're dripping," she said, pointing at the quickly developing puddle at his feet. He knew she didn't particularly care because she wasn't particularly neat. He moved his feet aside as she threw a towel over the water.

"I wonder what could have prompted Miss O'Neil to do a silly dance to girly music," Leo said, in his most teasing voice. "Boxy Smith?"

Her face went as red as her hair. "That was a cute story, wasn't it? Although I resent the implication that Casey is a vagabond minstrel who would marry me for money."

"Yeah, he knows that both of you are broke already."

April pulled out a copy of _Dead Love_ and paged through it, giggling occasionally. "My favorite part is when Nemean goes, 'Upon my honor, Integrity is my middle name.'" And then later on they see that his legal name is Nemean Integrity Firehouse. So you want to dance with me?"

Leo looked back and forth avoidantly. He was a graceful creature and he knew it. Possessing grace and the ability to make everybody else feel clumsy was one of his biggest points of pride, but for some reason that grace didn't extend to music, dance or anything related to musical rhythm. Even Mike was a better dancer then he was and Mike was left handed and had to learn everything backwards.

"You know I can't dance. That's just cruel to even ask," he said, attempting to charm his way out of it.

"No, no. I think some humility is good for any super-skilled ninja." She grabbed his hand and pulled him up.

They took a few awkward turns around the kitchen and she barely winced when he stepped on her feet. "I think too much," he said. "That's the problem. It's sort of important when you're trying to hack a guy with a katana, but not really helpful in this circumstance." He blocked out the music until its embarrassingly romantic lyrics intruded into his brain. He stepped on her foot again, missed a step and his green skin reddened.

"GET YOUR HANDS OFF OF MY WOMAN!" yelled a husky voice from April's fire escape.

"Casey! I'm sorry! I didn't mean any disrespect," he said, mindlessly apologizing as he jumped several feet away from April, who was doubled over laughing.

Great. All three of his brothers were on the escape out of sight. He could hear them snickering to each other. And then to make his discomfort complete, Casey grabbed April and kissed her very hard, making sure to maneuver her so that he had a clear and unobstructed view.

"Ew!" Don said like a ten year old girl as he climbed into the kitchen.

"What the hell is that?" Raph asked as he heard the girly music playing.

"That's the sound of love, Raph," Mikey said from behind him.

There was a small lake forming in the kitchen now, but April was too occupied making out with Casey to notice. Leo sighed and fetched a few of the uglier towels from her linen closet.

"Raph, you know I can't lead," he heard Mikey saying. "You lead."

Lead? What? Was that suddenly up for debate? He turned back to see his brothers waltzing to the feminine music. He laughed at his own irrational jealousy and then at how Raph was dragging Mikey around the room.

"That's the most perverse thing I've ever seen," April said.

Casey was sitting at the kitchen table and motioned for April to sit on his knee. She put her hands on her hips and instead sat on Donny's lap. Don very maturely stuck his tongue out at Casey.

The dance ended as Raph dipped Mikey backwards and then swung him by both hands through the air. Mike landed on the couch.

"That was a really nice dance until you threw your partner across the room," Leo said, sopping up the forgotten water, which had been tracked all over the room by that point.

"Let's do it again, Raph!" Mikey said, running back to his side.

Leo was about to put an end to the dancing because it disturbed him for reason, when he was distracted by something flashing out of the corner of his eye. He looked up to see April's computer monitor. An instant messenger window had popped up. "Somebody's trying to talk to you, April."

She got off Donny's lap and sat at the computer. "Spammer," she said without really looking. "Hey, wait. Leo, come read this."

"What did you say, Don?" Raph asked.

"I wasn't saying anything."

Leo stooped next to April and read the message on the screen. It said, _Blue Warrior, I will come for your child._

"Who sent this?" he asked.

"I don't know. There's no email associated with it. The address bar is just blank."

Raph's voice sounded more insistent and annoyed. "Okay, whoever is making that noise, you can stop now."

"What noise?" Casey asked. "I only hear you and them," he said motioning at Leo and April.

Leo struggled to contain his rising frustration. Raph was even going so far as to turn off the radio and check if anyone was outside the front door.

"It's officially not funny anymore," Don said, preparing to turn on the television.

"No! Quiet!" Mike said.

Great. Now they were both at it.

"It's asking if you want to renounce your trade," Mike said. "Whatever that means. Now it's on about the wolf in the trees again like before." Mikey was looking to the side, as if he were listening to someone who was standing nearby. He put his hands over his ears. "Oh, please shut up. Don't you guys hear it?"

Nobody spoke. "I don't hear anything. I'm afraid that you must have heard the neighbors," Leo said, hoping not to hurt Mikey's feelings. "You know how loud they can get."

"It isn't the neighbors!" Raph said, stepping between Leo and Mikey, as if to shield him from Leo's doubt. "I'm hearing it too. Sounds like somebody mumbling. And it keeps moving around. I can kind of see it, but not. It's like it's just out my vision everywhere I look. Do you see anything, Mike?"

Mike didn't respond. He was sitting on an armchair with his hands over his ears and his eyes shut.

"You guys are freaking me out. You know how easy that is," April said, sounding like she was trying hard to keep the atmosphere light.

"Let's check it out, Raph," Casey said, grabbing his golf bag and hockey mask. Leo was grateful. Doing was the best way to keep Raph from worrying. They were both out of the window and out of sight before Leo could look around to register that they were leaving.

April was sitting Don's lap again at the kitchen table. She leaned back and whispered something to him.

"I don't think that at all," Mike said out of nowhere, in a high-pitched and fairly hysterical voice.

_Blue Warrior, I will come for your child_. The thought came back in his head. He knew he'd heard something similar before but he couldn't place it. He hurried back to the computer screen and saw that the message box was gone. He didn't remember closing the window, but assumed that he'd forgotten with all the creepy ghost talk that followed.

"That's enough, Mike," Don said very sternly. He pushed April off his lap and walked up to Mike's armchair. He pulled his hands off of his ears and directed him to look into his face. "Now cut this out. It wasn't at all funny."

"I'm not doing it on purpose, you douche bag."

Don crossed his arms and his expression seized up. Leo wasn't sure what to think. He had a feeling that something strange was at work here and his first thought was that the apartment was haunted.

Casey slipped back in the window with Raph behind him. Leo didn't like the expression on Raph's face and probably wouldn't have liked the expression on Casey's face either if he hadn't been wearing a hockey mask to conceal it. "What's up?" Leo asked them.

"Wherever we go that thing just seems to follow," Raph said, pacing nervously. "It's like it's always out of my peripheral vision. It's driving me nuts. And you seriously can't hear that whispering?"

"Why are you guys doing this?" Don said, anger breaking through his voice. "I'm tired of you two trying to make us look stupid. I would have thought you were too old to pretend to hear voices."

"This is different," Mikey said. And Leo knew that it was because his eyes were full of tears.

"Oh, really. Remember when you pretended that you had that imaginary friend for about four years?"

"I was a kid," Mikey said in a pathetic voice.

"And Raph, remember when you said that the rats in the tunnels could talk and that I couldn't hear them because rats hate me?"

"It's not my fault that you're gullible," Raph said, moving his head back and forth in a really odd way, as if he were looking for something that he'd dropped. "I just can't get a lock on it. Well, go ahead! Run away! I still know you're here, you bastard!"

"Don, shut up," April said. "You're being kind of an ass. Mike's obviously upset and I don't think either of them could have sent that weird instant message. Leo, did that ring any bells?"

Leo was distracted by his brothers' distraught behavior and had to focus himself back on the problem to be solved. Mike was crying, Raph was looking back and forth like a bobble-head doll, yelling at an imaginary person and Don was pouting. "I kind of recognize it, but I can't remember why."

"My eyes are starting to burn," Raph said, holding his face in his hands. "Remind me not to roll 'em around in my head so much."

Leo sat at the computer with April and they both stared at the computer, no solution or suggestions coming to mind. Mikey was still sniffing in the background, with his hands over his ears.

"I'm a vagabond minstrel?" Casey asked with indignant surprise, _Dead Love_ open in his lap. "I should have been a knight. Then I could have carried a lance."

April opened her instant messenger, looking for any changes. Leo didn't know what her instant messenger settings looked like and so couldn't tell if anything had changed. He saw all of their names in an alphabetical list and saw that they were listed in her family folder. His heart gave a little happy bounce at seeing their names listed in a place of importance in someone else's life. "Don, are you going to help me here?"

Leo looked back at Don and saw that he was sitting with his legs and arms crossed, determinedly looking away from them.

"You're being pretty immature," Leo said.

"I don't think so," he answered. "I'm not the attention whore here."

April huffed and opened a browser window. "Fine. We'll do it without you then." She was quiet as she closed her eyes, thinking. "What does it look like?"

"Look like?" Raph said, as if the idea hadn't occurred to him before. "I don't know. Just dark. And kind of small. Or not really dark. Like nothing. That doesn't make any sense. Like a really black shadow that's moving. Like there's no light there. But it moves like a person or an animal."

"Wow, that sounds creepy," Leo said. He had to hand it to Raph. If this was an elaborate hoax, then he was certainly good at coming up with scary ideas.

"Okay." April entered the word shadow into the search bar and began reading basic information about shadows.

"You're so sexy when you're smart," Casey said from the kitchen table.

Leo smirked. "Thank you."

"Not you, wise ass."

April smiled at the computer monitor as she chose a link. "All I did was Google the word shadow. It's so easy that even you could do it. How many times have you seen this thing?"

Don scoffed loudly. Leo turned around to observe the heat gauge on Raph's anger. He was staring hard at Don with narrowed eyes and shifting back and forth, like a raging bull. "I haven't seen it before. I don't know maybe. I thought I imagined it last night."

"Maybe it's psychological," Don said, with unmistakable pleasure at the negative effect that it had on Raph. That was until Raph suddenly kicked Don's chair out from under him. Don landed on his knees, jumped back up immediately and before Leo could get a grasp on what had happened, Casey had Don in a headlock and Leo was sitting on Raph's shell, pinning his arm behind his back.

"HOW IS THIS HELPING AT ALL?" April raged. For some reason, she was standing on her chair. Leo would have laughed if he weren't so distracted.

Leo spoke calmly. It took more than a skirmish between his brothers to make him upset. And he didn't really blame them anyway. Actually, as he thought about it, he blamed Don. He knew that both Raph and Mike were stressed to capacity at the moment and Leo suspected that neither had gotten any sleep last night. "Raph, take Mikey home," he told him, in a voice that was just as even as if he weren't pinning him to the ground.

Casey reluctantly let go of Don, who fled to April under the pretense of looking at what she was reading on the computer monitor. Raph growled and huffed loudly as he grabbed Mikey by the arm. Leo's heart sank when he saw him. His eyes were red and puffy and he made no protest when Raph grabbed him by the arm and frog-marched him out the window.

___Blue Warrior, I will come for your child_, he thought, as he saw his brothers disappear out the window into the rain. Why did that sound so familiar?


	5. Chapter 5

_Thought I'd try to give this dream a different texture. I recently watched an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer called "Restless" that gave me a few ideas about writing dream sequences. Let me just say that Joss Whedon is a genius. I hope I didn't give away too much, but I suppose not because I still have more to give away._

I need to find the answer. I need to know now. Why isn't this computer helping me at all? I stared at the blank screen in front of me wondering where all the information was going.

"You're looking in the wrong place," April said.

"I know. Where do you think I should look?" I kept staring at the blank monitor. Nothing happened.

"You're not looking for an answer," she said.

"Yes, I thought so."

The answer was all around me. All I had to do was look for it. And then I realized that I was sitting inside of a cave. The computer was gone. Primitive drawings of animals ran around the walls and ceilings, done in yellow and red ochre and charcoal. There were horses, bulls, buffalo and all sorts of animals that hadn't been seen on the face of the earth for thousands of years. The outlines of human hands stretched out at me.

"Thousands of years are nothing," April said. "Especially to them."

I looked behind me and saw that there were shadows peaking at me from behind the rocks. The eyes of the creatures that live in this place where the hunters used to contact spirits and teach their young. I was afraid of them. They moved back and forth, jerking their heads at me. They wanted me to leave.

I ignored them. They weren't important.

"What are these paintings?"

"They're long dead," April said.

"What am I looking for?"

She didn't answer and I knew that she had abandoned me.

"I'll have to do it myself then."

The creatures were moving behind me, coming in closer. They wanted to grab me and overwhelm me.

It didn't matter. They weren't important.

The animals on the walls had moved. The outline of a bull looked directly at me. It spoke words and I knew that they were important.

* * *

Donatello opened his eyes and realized that he was sleeping in his infirmary bed. He was clutching a partially mutilated fan with the wires hanging out of the bottom and a television remote with a few buttons missing. What had he been doing?

Oh, yes. Blocking out Raph and Mikey's histrionics.

What had he just dreamed? It had seemed important. Then a phrase flew into his mind. He threw down the remote and the fan and scribbled the words onto a notebook. He went into the living room, looking for Master Splinter. This phrase looked like gibberish.

Mikey was sitting listlessly on the couch in the living room. He was staring at the television, even though it was off. Then Don realized that he wasn't staring. His eyes were darting back and forth as if he were a cat watching lint tracing through the air.

"What are you doing?" Don asked him.

His brother turned slowly to look at him. This wasn't right. Mikey's movements were usually quick and full of energy. He moved as if he had the flu. Even slower. And his mouth was open in an expression of mild confusion and concentration, eye ridges were furrowed.

"What are you doing, Mike?"

He didn't answer right away and finally looked up into Don's eyes, acknowledging his presence. "Nothing. I'm just sitting."

"I can see that." He couldn't remember the last time that he'd seen him just sitting. "You look really tired. Why don't you go lie down?"

He shook his head. "I'll go in the bedroom though. I'll try to read again. It just sounds like listening to the radio and TV at the same time though."

Mikey got off the couch and started stiffly towards the bedroom, but stopped halfway, as if something had just run in front of him. He threw out his hands, looking for something to grab onto. When he found nothing, he regained his balance and continued until he got into his doorway, where he paused to hold onto the doorframe before going inside.

Guilt swelled up in Don's throat and he fought off the urge to cry. He wouldn't cry. Crying wasn't important.

Master Splinter was sitting at the kitchen table having tea with Raph and Leo. Don stood in the doorway, hovering uncertainly. He knew that they had little meetings together every few days. Splinter liked to talk to Leo about the casual happenings of the day in an attempt to keep them both on mellow speaking terms. Raph was usually happy and smiling during these little talks, which mostly concerned things like who would win an election or why so-and-so got kicked off of "American Idol," but today Donny thought that Raph looked a little drained and distracted. His eyes shifted every so often from them and his laughter at the conversation was a little delayed. But this could just be typical Raph. Maybe he was still mad at him because of last night.

He pushed the thought of his mind and cleared his throat.

"Donatello," Splinter said, motioning him to a chair. "Would you like some tea also?"

"No thanks. I wondered if you guys recognized this."

He delicately sat at the table next to Raph, pulling his body away from him slightly as he pushed the notebook onto the table in front of them.

"El Hombre Del Saco?" Splinter read aloud. "I've never heard that phrase before. It is Spanish, correct?"

Raph mouthed it to himself and then said, "Purse man?"

Leo rolled his eyes. "Bag man."

"Does it sound familiar at all?"

They all looked at each other and then shook their heads.

"Where did you hear it?" Splinter asked, taking up the notebook to look harder at the written phrase.

"I dreamed it."

Raph's eyes darted towards him, but he didn't say anything. Don couldn't hold his guilt back any longer and said, "Raph, I'm sorry about how I was last night. You know what I think about this metaphysical crap."

Raph took a drink out of his teacup and didn't respond.

Don took the notebook back from Splinter. "I'll talk to Mikey about it first and then look it up. Speaking of Mikey, did anybody else notice how… wilted he looks today?"

"Yes, of course," Splinter said.

"He hasn't been right since last night," Leo said, shooting Don an unmistakably accusing look.

Don didn't want to argue with them. It wasn't at all productive. He'd already made a fool out of himself last night and didn't want to add to his disgrace.

As he headed toward Mikey and Raph's bedroom, he could hear a voice. "No, I heard you the first time and I still don't know what it means." It was Mike.

"Who are you talking to?"

Mikey winced when he saw Don watching him. He was sitting on his bed, his shell against the wall. Mr. Bear and a comic book were held limply in his hands. "If you're here to tell me that I'm crazy, then it isn't necessary. I already know."

Don sat on the bed next to Mikey and took Mr. Bear out of his arms and held him against his own plastron. How long had they had this thing? It was actually pretty disgusting. He remembered falling asleep on it as a pillow when they still didn't have a mattress. It used to be tan. Now it was dark grey. One of its eyes was missing. "I'm not going to declare you anything yet. I don't know what's going on."

"I'm hearing voices, Sherlock. It's not a hard conclusion to jump to. What's that?" Mikey had noticed the notebook in Don's hand.

"Oh, I wondered if this sounded familiar." He handed the notebook to Mikey, who read the line casually and shook his head. "Do you know what the voice is saying? I mean is it talking right now?"

"It's been talking all the time since last night." His voice was full of desperation.

"What is it saying?"

Mikey closed his eyes and paused for a second. Then he said, "'You refuse to see. You look for answers that don't exist.'"

He felt a shiver run down his body.

"That place is in darkness now, like your mind."

Don said, "The Lascaux Caves have been sealed since the 1960's. The exhalation of carbon dioxide from tourists was damaging the paintings. No one but scientists have seen those paintings for 40 years." He babbled facts. Facts would keep him safe. These were things he knew. He could fix it if it was based on facts.

"It's saying, 'You have never looked further than the surface.' Oh, now it's going on about the wolf again. I'm getting so tired of it."

"What's it saying about the wolf?" He'd rather hear about anything than the Lascaux Caves.

Mikey put his hands over his ears as he spoke. "I can't decide if he likes that wolf or if he hates it because he's always talking about how it likes its brain or something then it keeps saying that it's going to kill it or it'll die I guess. It just keeps going on and on about it. It calls it a pet or a toy sometimes. It's saying that it likes to play with it. Like it's amusing."

"Does it ever talk to you directly?"

Mikey avoided his eyes and didn't answer.

"So that's a yes?"

"It doesn't matter what it says about me. It doesn't make sense anyway."

They were both silent. Mikey winced suddenly, as if someone had just come into his line of vision or grabbed him roughly. Don could feel his body tense and then relax. "I have to go look this up," Don said, taking the notebook back from Mikey's relaxed fingers. "I'll tell you what I come up with."

Don sat at the blank computer monitor and reached for the power button. He hesitated. Didn't he have an ancient art book here somewhere? He searched amongst a pile of National Geographic books until he found the volume and opened it up to a page covered in the primitive paintings from his dream. The drawings from the Lascaux Caves. He knew that El Hombre Del Saco wouldn't be in here, but at the moment it didn't matter.


	6. Chapter 6

_I hope I'm not hitting the same note too many times, but I'm very happy with this note._

"What are you doing?"

_Leo can never let anything go_, Raphael thought as he pulled some C batteries out of a kitchen cupboard. "I'm going to go looking for that thing."

Leo's arms were crossed in an attitude of stubborn incredulity. "I thought you said that you hadn't seen it in a few days."

"Well, I know that it's here somewhere! It's doing something, even if we're sitting around waiting for Don to… I don't even know what he's doing in there!"

Leo looked towards the closed door of the lab and Raph had the feeling that Leo didn't really know either. He couldn't stay here listening to Mikey whimpering. His voice carried to the kitchen from the couch in the living room. Splinter hovered nearby, watching him.

"I'm taking specialist's equipment," Raph said, brandishing a flashlight.

"What will you do if you find it?" Leo said. "Do you have a plan?"

"I'll kick its ass. How's that for a plan?"

There was a loud bang from the direction of the lab and both of them jumped with surprise. Splinter directed his attention towards the door, not quite surprised at the disruption. "Damn it! Why doesn't this make any sense?" said Donatello's voice from the other room.

Leo was magnetically attracted to the sounds of distress and Raph made an easy and grateful getaway. He stopped in the tunnel immediately outside the lair entrance, realizing that he hadn't said goodbye to Splinter. He hesitated, wondering if he should go back.

Master Splinter was probably so distracted with Mikey's lethargy and Don's tantrum that he didn't notice that he was gone. Even in his head he knew that this was a lie.

He traveled automatically down the dark tunnels without really paying attention to where he was going. He hadn't seen the mysterious dark blur in the corners of his peripheral vision for a few days now and it made him uneasy. He wished he could find it. Maybe he could attract it to himself and lure it away from Mikey.

His little brother's behavior was becoming more disturbing by the day. Only last night he'd felt Mikey shaking him awake and then ask, "Raph, am I dead?" Leo had nearly force fed him that afternoon, nagging him for half an hour. Don was busy in the bat cave and didn't notice and Splinter had been on the phone with April, trying to come up with a miraculous medical explanation. That was Splinter's hope. That they would find out that he was depressed and only needed medication. April wasn't quite as hopeful and Raph wished she would bring her brain over here and help Don figure something out. He knew full well that she had just spent twenty four hours straight at the NYU library buried in seemingly useless research on shadows and depression and anything else they could desperately add to the list. _But she should be here,_ Raph thought. _It would be better if she was here doing something._

Wandering aimlessly in the tunnels was just as useless as sitting on his ass at home listening to Mikey talking to invisible people, he reassured himself. There was really nothing he could do for Mikey that the others weren't already doing. He was no good at nursing or comforting. Just the thought of it made his skin crawl.

Where was he? This stretch of the tunnel didn't look familiar. He had spent every year of his life in this place and the fact that he'd never been in this tunnel before when he was still so close to home was astounding. It didn't look very different from the rest of the tunnels near the lair. The walls were rounded brick, probably built in the 1800's. Water trickled at his feet and he could hear the sound of rats talking to each other nearby. _Rats can talk_, he thought. _We just don't understand them._

There was a rat moving around at the end of the tunnel just where it bent around a corner. But it couldn't be a rat. It was too big. Maybe a raccoon.

There was a secondary benefit to being outside of the lair lately. He had woken up from a nightmare two nights ago and Leo had claimed that he'd been screaming, although he was sure that it was an exaggeration. It was only that stupid wolf dream, but he wasn't going to spread it around. It felt dirty, like something that should be kept to himself.

It wasn't like he had that dream very often. Every six months maybe, if that. If they wanted to evaluate his dreams, then they should evaluate the dream he'd had last night because he'd sure like to know what that meant. In the dream, he'd gone to the bathroom and when he got there he'd found that the toilet was missing. And he had to piss really badly and it got even worse when he realized that there was nowhere to go. Normally, he would have just gone in the shower, but that didn't occur to him in the dream. So for some reason he had to go patrolling with a busting full bladder and he was having a hard time staying silent. Not because of his bladder, but because of the full brass band that was following him around playing the "1812 Overture." Casey was waiting for him on one of the rooftops and declared himself Master of the Universe. Then he complained that he couldn't write his whole name on his checks anymore because _Casey Jones, Master of the Universe_ was too long. Leo materialized out of nowhere and told them that he had decided to go to clown college and that Raph needed to go home right away because Splinter was picking up the lair and moving it to a different city.

Where was he now? He'd walked the entire time that he had mused about his bizarre dream, but he was right back in this stupid tunnel and that raccoon was still crawling around near the corner.

He would turn around and try the left fork this time. That should run towards the highway. The flashlight was still tucked into his belt, unused. Using it felt like cheating.

What was he even looking for anyway? An undefined black blob. Well that narrowed it down. There were undefined black blobs in all the sewer tunnels in the entire city, he thought smiling to himself.

He was humming. When did he start doing that? It was okay. At least it filled the silence a little bit. Silence was an unnerving thing to him. It just meant emptiness. Not necessarily loneliness. Emptiness and loneliness were two entirely different things. You could be lonely when you were with many people and feel totally fine when you were alone. _Wow, that was deep. I should go home and write an epic poem about it_, he thought. Poetry made him nauseous.

Eventually, he came upon an old mattress lying on a small platform, above the water level. It was designed as a pit-stop or way-station in case they were ever trapped in the tunnels. He knew that some of the bricks were loose and that emergency rations were kept in a tackle box behind the wall.

Home was that way. He looked back down the tunnel he had just left. And April's apartment was that way. He looked to the left fork ahead of him. Maybe he would take the right fork. It lead towards downtown. He knew it pretty well.

Still no sign of the stupid thing he was after. This was feeling pretty pointless. His stomach growled and he decided to drag out some of the rations and see if they were still fit for turtle consumption.

As he sat on the mattress, listlessly eating a granola bar, he thought, _This would make a great place for a date. You have everything you need. Food for a home cooked meal, all the essentials to build a romantic fire, a gently rippling brook nearby. A mattress._

Hadn't he had a dream about this? He'd definitely dreamed that he'd been on a date a few days ago. He'd been on a date with a woman and he couldn't remember her name and was worried that she would notice. Strange dream for a guy who had never been on a date and only knew one woman.

He walked for at least another half an hour towards downtown, in a sort of traveling trance, letting his feet carry him along while his mind went on autopilot and wondered what they would cook for dinner when he got home and if April had picked up the movies he'd asked for at the video store.

Then he was shocked out of his reverie. He was back in that same tunnel that he'd never seen before and that raccoon was still there, crawling at the end of the tunnel. "What is this? 'The Blair Witch Project?' Is this your big plan to scare me?" he asked the darkness. "By getting me lost?"

Nothing answered him but his own voice, echoing down the tunnels. It was time to use his specialist's equipment. He pulled the flashlight off his belt and shined it down the tunnel, trying to see around the next bend. It looked like just another tunnel. Just another tunnel in the endless system of sewer tunnels. Why hadn't he gone topside. At least there he could clearly see where he was.

The beam of the flashlight roamed back and forth across the end of the tunnel, but didn't find an animal near the bend as he'd expected. That was strange. It must have been scared away by the light.

He would just go find out what it was for himself. As he advanced down the tunnel and the bend came closer into view, he felt an urge to turn around and go the other way. He stopped for a second and looked down at his feet.

There was Mr. Bear, lying in a puddle where he had thought he'd seen the raccoon. He picked up the sopping wet stuffed animal and held it up to look in its face, as if it were a naughty child and said, "How did you get all the way out here? None of us have left the lair in days."

He was about to turn around and go back the way he came when he noticed the same movement only a few feet away in the other direction, in the shadows, outside of the beam of the flashlight.

"What are you playing at?" Raph angrily yelled at the shadow as it trembled and flitted in and out of the darkness, temptingly betraying its presence. "I'm sick of this haunting shit. I'm sick of funhouse games and I'm sick of my brother asking me if he's dead." He shook Mr. Bear at the shadow for emphasis.

And there was the whispering again. Too faint to be understood, but still flat and dry and free from any emotion. "Talk all you want," Raph said, coming forward towards the shadow, which flitted out of the reach of the flashlight. "I'm going to see you. And then I'll kill you. So scurry around and whisper at me all you want. It's not bothering me none. Actually, I'm glad to have the company."

It stopped moving. He stepped ahead a few paces as the thing came into the rays of the flashlight.

The flashlight stopped working and everything went black. He dropped Mr. Bear and thumped the flashlight hard against his hand, unable to see after his eyes had adjusted to the light.

He knew that it was moving again and it was nearby. He couldn't feel the thing, or even the air circulating or the water rippling or hear any movement. But his skin tingled, his body knowing that it was close by.

The whispering stopped and he knew that he had lost it and that it was gone. The flashlight came to life with another whack. "WHERE ARE YOU!" he bellowed down the sewer tunnel, knowing in his heart that it had abandoned him and was nowhere nearby. "COME BACK, YOU BASTARD!"

He could at least bring Mr. Bear back to the lair. How did that thing get so far out here anyway? He directed the flashlight at his ankles, but Mr. Bear was nowhere to be seen.

Raph walked back to the lair, bubbling with frustration and a vague sense of shame that the thing had just wafted past his ankles and escaped as he stupidly banged on the flashlight.

"How did it go?" Leo asked as soon as he entered the doorway.

"Nothing happened. Totally useless."

"Did you see anything?" Raph saw that Leo was sitting on the couch and that Mikey's head was resting in his lap. He was covered with a blanket and holding Mr. Bear. Raph stared at it for a second. It was totally dry. But he knew he'd just been holding a wet Mr. Bear out in the tunnels.

"Raph?" Leo repeated.

"No, it was useless," Raph said.

That night he ravaged his punching bag, trying to forget the smell that Mr. Bear had given off as he'd held the wet thing in his hands and the feeling of the creature moving past his feet and the realization that he had come so close to it and had nothing to show for it. Mike was in their bedroom, quiet for once.

That night Raph was awoken again by Mikey.

"What is it?" Raph asked. "You okay?"

"Are we dead?"

Raph hesitated. "Come here." He held up his blanket so that Mike could crawl into his bed. Mike laid his shaking head against Raph's plastron and he cringed at the feeling of his warm skin. He hated that feeling. "Do I feel dead?"

He didn't answer right away. "No."

"Then I must be alive. And living people need sleep, so shut up or I'll tape your mouth shut." Mikey's arms and legs twitched for a while until he finally got to sleep. Raph couldn't sleep when he knew that somebody else was touching him and he knew that Mikey would wake up if he moved at all. So he lay there silently all night, waiting for morning.


	7. Chapter 7

_Having a hard time coming up for creepy stuff for the voice to say that doesn't give away too much. Had to listen to music from The Village in order to get it right. Just found a really simple but terrifying pencil drawing of a Shadow Person and it scares the crap out of me. It's almost the same exact image that I dream sometimes and they're really terrifying dreams. The picture is here ._.

This was the story he would write. In a small Irish village on the shore of one those grassy cliffs that they always show in movies about Ireland, would live a red headed girl. She would stand on the edge of the cliffs looking at longingly at the sea, hoping to find a white sail on the horizon. Her husband would be missing for months. She would have no way to feed her baby.

He would name her Siobhan. Naming things gives you power. He knew that names were important.

She lived in a small stone cabin in a small village. He watched her cook on a small open fire. This house was ancient and he knew that no one had lived there for thousands of years. The house was nothing but an outline in the ground in a National Geographic article. He was the only one with the power to bring it back to life and rebuild the walls. Not even an archaeologist could do that.

She wore a long white nightgown and stoked the open fire. She was happy to have her little house and he was happy to see her happy. He liked to see people being happy.

But the cradle was empty. It sat nearby and she leaned down looking into it expectantly, but nothing was in it. They both looked back a few times. She mouthed something at him. He didn't hear any words, but knew that she wanted him to find the baby.

He didn't want to leave this place. It was warm and he knew that it would be cold and wet outside. The darkness of the night was vast and it pressed heavily. There was a face at the window. A dark shape where a face should be, but no face. He was full of dread. That thing would come in here.

The ground was wet and the ground rolled in hills into the horizon. The hills were filled with the dead and their presence was comforting. Many others had passed this way on their journey.

The house was nothing but an outline in the ground and the girl was most likely buried in these barrows under his feet. His story wouldn't be so brief. He would keep it from ending.

A lion was walking through an overgrown vegetable garden. It looked old and tired, but he knew that he should follow it. The lion would protect him and wouldn't let his story end.

The barrows and hills were steep and endless and he knew that no one was around. This void could kill him if wasn't careful. The night was dark, except for the overly bright moon. He passed a headstone with no name and felt pity for the warrior who had fallen in the dark and would never be known.

The lion led him to a ballroom. People were dancing and he knew that he wouldn't be able to participate because he didn't have a partner. He saw several girls his own age standing against the wall, watching him. The people danced like they do in Jane Austen movies, where the men are all dressed the same and the girls wear pretty empire-waist dresses.

The dancers stopped their revolutions as he took a step towards them. He knew that they weren't looking at him because they couldn't see him. It must be something else.

The lion was gone. He was alone. A few of the dancers parted ways as a skinny old man entered the ballroom. He looked around at them smiling. The large sack on his back was filled with something lumpy and he thought that it was moving. Liquid dripped from the bottom onto the floor. The old man pointed a withered finger at him.

* * *

"Mikey, wake up," he heard. "You've been asleep for about sixteen hours."

Asleep? Had he been asleep? He couldn't really tell anymore. Leo was looking into his face. Where was he? The couch. His bladder was full to the bursting point.

"Gotta go to the bathroom," he mumbled. He threw out his hands as the blackness swirled in front of his eyes. He batted uselessly at it, hoping in vain that it would leave him.

"I've got you. Don't worry," Leo said, holding on to his arm.

_…the barrows are full of bones…_

"Great," Mike muttered to himself and somewhat to the disembodied voice that wouldn't shut up and let him use the john in peace.

_…the cradle is empty…_

"What's great?" Leo asked, pushing the bathroom door open.

_ …the grave is blank…_

"Nothing. Just keep talking. Maybe I won't be able to hear it."

_…the sack is full…_

Leo shut the door and Mike knew that he was standing on the outside, listening to what he was doing. "Me and Raph tried to make dinner for you. Didn't turn out that well. We got more food on each other than we did in the stove."

"Did you have a fight?" Mike asked.

"No," Leo said, stifling laughter. "We were actually having a food fight. Master Splinter kind of told us off for it. You would have had fun. You slept right through it."

He finished in the bathroom and sat back on the couch. The TV screen was blank. Must have been off.

"Mike?" That was Raph. He was standing nearby.

"What?"

"You okay?"

_You know how this one will end…_

I don't know.

"You didn't answer. Are you okay?"

"I don't know," he said. Hadn't he already said that?

_It is a hated creature. Despised by even the ones it loves. Imagine what its enemies will do to it when it finally comes to an end._

Raph was sitting next to him. He should answer. "Yeah, I'm okay. How are you?"

Raph was talking. _It will not only be killed. It will utterly destroyed. And you will be disgusted at the sight of it. _"…so I told him to stick his head in the flour and he threw some at me…"

"What?"

He wasn't talking now. This was bad. He must be mad. And there it was. The thing. Sitting in the corner, watching them.

Raph was looking at it too. "What's it carrying on about now?" he asked. He was scared. Why was that? He was never scared.

"It's talking about you," Mike said. "It's telling me that our enemies will kill you and defile your body and stuff. It likes to talk about that whenever you're in the room now. It says they'll take your shell as a trophy and cut off your fingers and gouge out your eyes."

He left the room. If he didn't want to know what it was saying then he shouldn't have asked.

Leo was holding a tray of food. "I'm not hungry," Mikey said, pushing it back at him.

"You haven't eaten in days." Leo automatically held the tray back at him, expecting him to take it.

"I'm not hungry!" Mike knocked the tray out of his hands and the food flew through the air. The plate crashed to the floor.

Leo stared at him. He was mad. Maybe worried.

He looked back into the corner. The thing was still there. It was always there and he knew it was there when he was looking away. It had no face, but still it watched him. Crouched down on all fours.

Where was Raph? He needed Raph to stay close. What if something happened to him? Leo was calming him down. Had he been panicking? Raph was just in the bedroom. He was fine. Was he still awake? He never could tell.

Don was now in the room and so was Master Splinter. Why didn't Master Splinter make that thing leave? "Please get rid of that thing," Mikey said to him as Master Splinter laid a hand on his forehead. "Why are you letting it just sit there? You're supposed to protect us."

They all looked into the corner. "There's nothing there," Don said. "I'm trying to figure out what's wrong with you."

They said a lot of words to him that were meant to make him feel comforted, but he couldn't look away from the shadow in the corner or block out its voice.

_Your story will soon end._


	8. Chapter 8

_What can I say? I love Raph's subconscious._

Another day of this. Another day watching Mikey waste away on the couch, jumping at nothing. Another day of Don locked in the lab, staring at the computer screen and pulling apart random electronics. Another day of April stuck at a library, looking at old records and calling them with no news. Another day of Splinter sitting near Mikey, watching his youngest son with no discernable way to help him.

Leo could think of nothing to do but meditate, but nothing was happening. He sat in the dojo staring ahead at the brick wall, wondering why Raph and Mikey could both see this thing. He was secretly grateful that he could not.

"What are you up to?" Raph asked. Leo's heart sank a little to see him. He had been following him around all day. His eyes were dark from lack of sleep and his limbs were more sluggish than usual.

"Trying to meditate. Trying, but not managing."

Raph sat across from him. "Feels like everything's going slower and slower, doesn't it?"

Leo sighed as assent.

"Mind if I join you? Or try to anyway? You know how rotten I am at meditating."

"Yeah, okay." Maybe it would help to have another presence to focus on instead of his own disjointed thoughts.

But Raph's mind was not a comforting place to be on the best of days. His mind raced from one disconnected idea to the next and he tended to stick to the bad thoughts and cycle through them over and over again until he'd worn them out.

Leo enjoyed meditating with Mikey the most. His mind was just a landscape of dull contentment. Don's mental space was very rigid with right angles and he tended to purposefully redirect his thoughts away from ideas that were too abstract for him to easily grasp.

As they both closed their eyes, Leo wondered if they were both too tired for it work anyway.

But then Raph's thoughts hit him like a punch in the face. _What if Leo judged his thoughts? What if Mikey died? Where was April? He missed her. Why hadn't Don thought of anything yet and why hadn't he spoken to him in days? What if Mikey died? Why didn't he ever catch the thing that chased him? Why does that thing want to kill the wolf? Had he left the stove on when he left the kitchen? Why was Leo feeling so worried about him? He could take care of himself. What if Mikey died? What if Mikey died? He couldn't starve to death in five days time. He wished Mikey would hurry up and die. Then that thing would leave him alone. What if Mikey died? He would kill himself. Why was Leo feeling so worried?_

But then Leo was confused. Raph was pulling away, but his mind was going deeper into itself and Leo knew he was being dragged along with it. Raph's thoughts died down for a while into a dull and flat space, mostly repeating the same ideas over and over. _Mikey's dying. Did I leave the stove on? Body will be defiled. Mikey's dying. Did I leave the stove on? Body will be defiled._ The repetition was almost soothing until everything came into focus.

He certainly wasn't meditating anymore, but he wasn't in the dojo either. He was in a cramped and dark space. He knew there was no light and yet he could see Raph lying on his side on the floor. Voices yelled from somewhere and he could see his brother jerking momentarily, listening to hear if they were coming his way.

Why was Raph chained to the ground? Was this a memory? If so, then why didn't he remember it too?

The chains on his wrists must have cut in deeply because blood was crusted around the shackles. Now that Leo looked more closely, his whole body was covered in scratches, scars, burns and every kind of injury he could imagine. Why was he just lying there? Raph would never just lie there.

The door of the cell opened and someone entered. He couldn't make out who it was. It was as though as soon as his eyes focused on them, they evaporated and he had to work all over again to get them into focus. Whoever it was had brought a tray of metal instruments. They were rusty and blood covered. Raph twitched, but didn't really move.

How did this happen? What were they about to do? The mysterious person picked up a corroded knife and thrust it into Raph's side. As it made connection with his flesh, his eyes snapped to Leo's and he knew that he saw him.

Then Leo was thrust backward out of Raph's mind with such violence that he was sure he was going to be sick.

He was in the dojo looking up at the ceiling. Splinter's voice was echoing nearby. "Leonardo? What is happening?"

Leo sat up and saw that Raph was also on his back.

"Did I leave the stove on?" Raph asked.

"What the hell was that?" Leo had an urge to throw himself at Raph and check for knife wounds, but realized that it would be idiotic as his mind cleared.

"Sorry about that." Raph sounded mildly embarrassed. "I think I kind of fell asleep."

Leo stared at Splinter. He knew his mouth was open in surprise and that he must not look terribly dignified. "That was the weirdest… Raph, did you see me in your dream?"

Raph scratched at his side. "Yeah, I think you were there. Why?"

"I do not understand what you are trying to say, Leonardo," Splinter said, helping him to his feet.

"I think you dragged me into your dream. It was the strangest thing. We were meditating together and he worrying about stuff…"

Raph's posture instantly assumed the defensive. He crossed his arms and took a half a step backwards.

"…and then he was having a bad dream, I guess."

Raph muttered as he left the room, "Can't have anything to myself. Not my dreams. Not anything. Is the stove still on? Why didn't anybody turn that off? Do I have to do everything around here?"

Leo was tired and the image of Raph being tortured and stabbed wasn't fading as easily from his mind as it had faded from Raph's. He just wanted to go to bed and have his own dreams. For some reason, dreaming in tandem was exhausting. But Splinter demanded to have a debriefing. He recounted what he had seen and felt, being careful to sanitize the more disturbing flows of Raph's brain. Splinter found this new dimension of meditation to be very interesting and advised Leo to keep it in mind. He would inform April of the development.

Leo didn't think there was much point and couldn't see how it could help Mikey. The most he had gained from the experience was the realization that Raph's brain was a much more frightening place than he had estimated.

The rest of the day passed very slowly. Mikey cried for hours and still refused to eat. The strained tedium was only broken every hour or so when Mike jumped up screaming and panicking over nothing in particular.

Raph attacked his punching bag later in the afternoon and Leo couldn't help but peek in on him from time to time to reassure himself that he was still whole.


	9. Chapter 9

_I've only seen people hypnotized on TV, so forgive my inaccuracies. This one got long. Oops._

"Raph, you're going to get an STD if you're not careful," I said, as I closed my locker.

"It's none of your business, is it?" he said. I noticed that he didn't even have his books.

"Are you going to class?" I checked my hair in the mirror that hung inside the locker door.

"I need a break first. Want to come?"

"Sure." I shut my locker and we walked down the hallway, past a clique of preppie girls that wouldn't talk to me. He gave a wink to Marissa Pritchard as he passed. Raph was such a slut. Marissa got pregnant in her senior year and married Alan Jenkins, the guy who had knocked her up. They have a few kids now and she's a dental hygienist.

Raph puffed hurriedly on his cigarette behind the dumpster. I watched the football players out on the track field and tried to spot Leo. Don was sitting on the ground reading an SAT prep test and Mikey was watching Raph as the smoke curled out of his mouth. "Can I try?" he asked.

"No!" I said.

"Yeah, come here," Raph said, overruling me. I hate being the only girl. "Just stick it in your mouth and take a big breath."

Mikey eagerly did as he was told. He choked and spat the cigarette out on the blacktop.

Leo jogged across the field to meet us. He didn't acknowledge the smoking. "What's up? I'm going to shower and then I have chemistry."

"We all know your schedule," Don muttered, not looking up from his prep test.

"I'm not going to be home tonight," Raph said, lighting up another. "I have to practice with the guys. Me and Casey are going to play at Jake Serra's party Saturday night."

Jake Serra died two years after high school when he was working on a construction site and the building collapsed on him.

"Are we invited?" I asked, already knowing the answer.

Raph looked away from us, at the cheerleaders running around the track field. I bet he'd banged every one of them. "Only Leo."

"How come?" Mikey said in childish shock.

"Don't come home wasted," Leo said, taking a glance back at the field to make sure that the coach hadn't noticed his absence. "That's getting old pretty quick. And I'm not going to that party."

"We're not invited because we're not cool, Mike," Don said automatically. "I'm not going to be home until late either. I have a meeting with those weirdoes from the Dance Committee. Any of you going?"

"The dance?" I asked, wrinkling up my nose. "They video tape us dancing and then broadcast it at the end of the year."

Then we were in the lunch room. I saw my biology teacher, Mr. Harris, cutting past the students in the hot lunch line. He was fired a few years ago for fondling a student. I was standing behind Raph and then paced backward to put Mikey in between us because Raph smelled like a smoke stack.

We all went to our table. We always sat at the third table from the lunch line because Mikey wanted to be able to keep an eye on his car in the parking lot. Raph scared away a little freshman girl that was sitting in his seat.

Mikey was worriedly looking at his report card. Leo snatched it out of his hand and then handed it to me. Don read it over my shoulder. "Failing?" I said. "How can you fail civics?"

"At least I'm doing good in English," Mikey said. "I spend all my time with that writing group and I'm in a Dungeons and Dragons campaign that's taking way more time that I thought it would and then I'm playing World of Warcraft…"

"How can you fail English?" Raph asked. "You speak English and write English. You're dream is to go to the University of Iowa for creative writing. I think Dad would give you away if you failed English."

"If he gave anybody away, it would be you," Don said, pointing at him with a carrot. "You're going to make him a grandfather before you're out of high school."

"Don't worry. I'm not that stupid," Raph said.

Leo was eating really fast because he wanted to go catch Coach Walters before his next class. Coach Walters left to teach at another high school after I graduated and I don't remember what happened to him. I think my aunt told me his wife died of cancer, but I didn't know her. Leo kept looking down at his food as he said, "You're not wearing your promise ring, Raph."

"I lost it." Raph was glaring at him. This was a classic Leo/ Raph smack down situation and I hoped that Leo would just drop it. Last time they had a fight at school they were both suspended and Raph only had one more disciplinary action left before he was sent to that school across town for delinquents. Our Dad had given us all rings promising not to have sex until marriage or until when we were well out of the house and he didn't know about it. Mine fell down a drain last year. I wore it long after its meaning had been lost.

"You did not lose it," Mikey hissed, making sure to wave his own in front of Raph's face. "You took it off. And don't think that Dad doesn't notice."

Raph picked up his lunch and tossed it in the garbage, then stormed out of the lunchroom dramatically.

I went to the library with Don after school. He wanted a book on Jung's psychological archetypes for a report.

"There's something moving over there behind the shelf," I said.

A dark mass was twitching slightly on the ground in the gaps behind the books on the shelf. I thought we should leave the library. I should go home. Why was I here?

"Just ignore it," he said.

But I couldn't ignore it. Don traveled along the shelves, pulling out books and everywhere we went, it followed. I could see it scurrying behind us, watching us. Suddenly, I wished that Leo was there to tell me what to do. I knew that Raph wasn't safe from himself and that Mikey was failing. There was nothing I could do. This was all useless.

* * *

"Wake up, Babe," said a familiar voice. April awoke to find her face in a book in the NYU library. She looked around for Donny and was confused to see Casey sitting at her table with two cups of coffee. Research. Shadow thing haunting the lair.

"Thanks," she said, inhaling the caffeine. "Come on, brain. Come back."

"Looks like you found some stuff," Casey said, shifting a pile of photo copies.

"Don't touch those!" she yelled. "I have them all sorted. I have a copy for me and for Don and those are homework, I think. How are they doing?"

"Same, I guess. They haven't called me." Casey was reading an old newspaper report and raised his eyebrows at the details.

April knew what he was reading and said, "Yeah, I know. I should probably gather all of this up and get over there. I don't think I can find anything else here."

Casey began stacking library books into her duffle bag.

"Oh, no. Those are reference books. They need to go back on the shelf. I'm just taking these here and the photo copies. Just put the stuff in the bag. Don't mix up the piles. I'll check these out at the desk and put these away."

They left the library with enough research to burden the most learned professor and still April felt that they didn't have much information. At least much that made sense.

Casey put an arm around her waist, which was rather awkward since they were both carrying a tote bag full of heavy books and papers. "You should go home and get some rest."

"No," April said. She stopped on the curb, remembering to look at her cell phone and check for status updates from the boys. Nothing from Mikey, which made her rather sick. Raph had sent several asking her if she was home. Leo sent a regular report on any strange occurrences, which were mainly the same. Mikey was wasting away, Raph was jumpy, Splinter was worried and Don was still baffled. No word on himself though.

"Find anything good?" Casey said.

She jumped, forgetting that he was there. "I don't know. I found lots of interesting stuff but not much that, you know, fits together and paints a complete picture."

"Well, Don can probably make sense of it," Casey said. She admired his blind faith.

* * *

April and Casey dumped the impressive amount of research on the kitchen table in the lair. Leo looked up at them from his dinner without saying anything and then looked down at the piles of paper. She knew that he was mentally tabulating the amount of work he was expecting to do looking through and sorting the information and she could see him deflating as his estimate got larger and larger.

"Don't worry," she said, taking a broccoli floret off his plate. "I've done all the hard work already." Casey had disappeared in search of Raph. "Where is everybody?"

"Splinter's in the lab with Don. I think he wants him to look up more medical stuff. Raph's out in the tunnels. I don't have a clue what he's doing. And Mikey's… you didn't see him on the way in?"

She shook her head and Leo led her into the living room. Leo knelt down next to the couch where Mike was sleeping, covered with a blanket. She stopped a few feet away, wondering why he looked so strange when he didn't really look that different.

He was thinner and his skin color was off. Leo roused him gently and then squinted at the dark patches on his arms. "These are getting worse," he said to himself.

"Those are what?" she asked.

"Oh, excuse me," he said, unnecessarily apologizing to her. "They're bruises. He has them in patches all over."

Mikey opened his eyes and looked blankly up at Leo. She could hear him breathing roughly as if it was taking an effort. "My joints are still all achy. Can I have more Tylenol?"

"No, not yet. April's here to see you."

That was her cue. Leo stepped aside to make room for her as she took his place and knelt next to him. "Hey, sweetheart. How do you feel?"

He didn't answer. His eyes moved rapidly over the room as if looking for something. They settled on something in the far corner.

"Did you meet your quota of kisses for the day?" she asked in a teasing voice.

"I don't know," he said. Usually he would play back to that kind of invitation to be cuddled.

She bent down and kissed his forehead. His skin felt cool and sweaty and she wondered why he wasn't shivering. She spent a minute wondering about the bruises and cold skin as she stroked his cheek and then pecked him on the mouth. He didn't acknowledge her affection.

"Raph'll be glad to see you," Mike said as she drew back from him.

She was slightly confused at his line of thought.

"Well, we're all glad to see her," Leo said from behind her.

"He misses harder than the rest of us though." Mikey rubbed his eyes with his fists, but didn't move to sit up. "You're his princess."

April smiled. "How do you know this? Did he tell you?"

"No, that thing did," he said, pointing to the corner that had drawn his eye.

She turned to see an empty corner and then her eyes darted to Leo, looking for an explanation. He didn't seem at all surprised.

"It talks about him a lot. When I'm gone…"

"Don't say that," she said, in a rather more imperious voice than she had intended.

"When I'm gone you have to look out for him. Don't leave him alone. We shouldn't leave him alone now."

April could feel Leo coming closer behind her. "Why?" he asked.

Mikey curled back into his blankets and shook his head. They couldn't get him to say any more.

* * *

The lab smelled pretty bad, April thought as she sat on an old row of van seats that served as a love seat. Don probably hadn't left the room or bathed for a week now. He didn't look especially sleep deprived, but he did look a little more absent minded than usual. As soon as he set down his cup of coffee he had to ask where he'd put it and he did that about four times before they started the meeting.

Raph stood in the lab doorway and pointed at her. "Hey, I remember you."

She patted the seat next to her and he hurriedly sat down before Casey could get the chance.

Splinter took a pile of the papers that she had given to Don and paged through them. "This is quite a bit of information. I hope that you found something of use."

She threw a huge book in Raph's lap and he made a face, pretending she'd just injured him severely. "I definitely found weird stuff. Let's start at the beginning." She pulled out a handful of photocopies. "There are of course stories about babies and children disappearing and people seeing ghosts and stuff all the way through history. And I did find quite a few that looked suspiciously related but this is the first that I found that was obviously similar. There are a few more. Here," she said handing another pile to Raph, who was overwhelmed with papers. "The Baker family lived in the Bronx in the 1830's and the smallest child, a three year old named Elizabeth, went missing on June 4, 1834. They all suspected that the parents had done something to her and they never found the little girl. That same year, the mother went crazy. It doesn't really say how. They found her with her wrists slashed in her bed and the family had to move away, probably because of their reputation. Everybody thought that the mother killed the baby and then herself. She killed herself, like, right away. Like two weeks later."

"Sucks for them, I guess," Don said. "I'm not seeing the relevance."

"Patience," Splinter said. "I'm willing to hear anything that April thinks is valid. We have nothing else."

April reached for another group of papers and Raph spilled some of them on the floor as she shifted them in his arms. "Well, that's nothing. The Sullivan family in 1873 had a baby disappear. A newborn name John. They didn't suspect the family right away, but they were Irish immigrants and nobody really cared that much, so it wasn't investigated thoroughly. But then, the teenage sister of the baby, Mary, goes nuts. She starts talking to people who aren't there and seeing a 'dark shadow man' following her. They sent her to a sanitarium, where she supposedly said that it was all her fault over and over and then one day they found that she'd hanged herself with her bed sheets. So it was always figured that she had really done it."

"This thing likes somebody else to take the fall for it," Casey said.

"Correct," she said and she craned her neck up to reward him with a kiss.

"If I get one right, can I have a kiss?" Raph asked, hugging the lose papers to his plastron to keep them from blowing away.

"Yeah, sure," Casey said, leering at him.

"Those are just two instances," Don said, sitting down on the infirmary bed between Leo and Splinter. "How many cases did you find?"

"Three more." Raph looked heartbroken, knowing that she was about to cycle a million papers through his arms. "A family in the 1950's, a family in 1910 and a family in 1992."

"Where is the family from 1992?" Leo asked. "Are they around? Can we talk to them?"

April grabbed a stack out of Raph's hand and it tore in half. "I don't think so," she said, holding them together. "Looks like there was just the mother and the nine-year-old boy and the mother shot herself. I've been looking into other stuff too. I mean psychological stuff."

Raph threw the papers on the floor. "Neither of us are crazy, so if you're even going to start…"

"No, no. I don't think you're crazy," she said, grabbing his hand. He pulled away uncomfortably. "I've been looking into shadows and shadow men. I found an interesting thing that Carl Jung said…"

"The shadow archetype," Don said, instantly jumping to his bookshelf and muttering to himself. "Why didn't I think of that before?"

"It's so simple right," April said to him, knowing full well what he was thinking.

"Well, not for all of us." Leo was crossing his arms at them.

Don handed him a psychology book and pointed to a drawing of a shadowy figure standing in a doorway. "Carl Jung said that the human psyche… well I guess it includes rats and turtles too now… had a limited number of instinctual archetypes. Like the mind can only categorize itself in a certain amount of ways. Our brain divides itself into parts like The Self, The Anima, The Animus and they all represent different things to us. There's one archetype called The Shadow or The Scarecrow. It tends to represent all the parts of ourselves that we despise or fear. It's hard wired into the more primitive part of our brain and so we all share it in common."

"You're coming awful close to saying I'm crazy, Don," Raph said, gathering the papers off the floor.

April pushed an armload of plat map copies into his arms. "I'm not saying that you're going nuts, I just think that it's probably relevant. But I don't know how. What were you looking into, Don? That Spanish phrase?"

"Yeah." He sat at the computer and flipped through a few browser windows.

Leo was still looking at the drawing of The Shadow Man. April wondered why it seemed to bother him so much. As far as she knew, he hadn't seen it.

"It's the story of El Hombre Del Saco or The Sack Man. It's just a stupid story that people in Latin America tell their kids to make them behave. I don't think it's at all relevant. Anyway, it's just this folktale about a skinny old man who goes around villages picking up little kids and throwing them into his sack. He carries a big sack on his back."

April waited for him to finish and the following pause indicated that he felt that his explanation was sufficient. "Why?"

"He picks up naughty children and carries them off and eats them. He's a variant on the Bogeyman. Like I said, it's something that parents tell their kids to make them stay in line."

Well, that wasn't at all helpful. April wondered if the next line of research should be undiscovered diseases or diseases specific to turtles.

"Maybe it's based on something real."

Was that Raph?

"Huh?" Don asked. He was checking his Facebook.

"What if the Sack Man is based off a real man?" Raph was letting the papers trickle onto the floor again.

"A real man?" Leo looked like he wanted to refute Raph's argument, but was too afraid. "He'd have to be at least 200 years old by now and older because he'd have to be as old as the Sack Man story."

"I don't mean a man. I mean… I don't know what I mean. It would be nice if we could ask him. But he's just a wispy ball of shadow."

Her brain spun around the image of Mikey lying on the couch and staring into the corner.

_"Did he tell you?"_

_ "No, that thing did."_

"But it does speak to you," she said, grabbing Casey's wrist, as if he had been about to get up and leave the room. "He speaks through Mike. Or indirectly anyway. Mike made it sound like it talks to him."

They all exchanged awkward looks. "That's still up before committee," Leo said quietly.

"Committee!" Raph jumped to his feet. Just what they needed right now. Raph losing it. "I've seen this thing with my own eyes too! Are we having a group hallucination? How do you explain it?"

"If it is a disease or illness," Splinter said, holding up a hand, signaling him to take his seat. "Then it may be contagious and affect both of you."

He wasn't buying it, but took his seat anyway. He meant to sit down looking really dark and menacing, but he sat on a book and some papers and the sound wasn't terribly dignified.

"Maybe you could find a way to talk to it through Mikey," Casey said. "Some way to… you know… phone in through him."

* * *

"Will this hurt? I don't really like all of you watching. It feels like trying to pee with an audience," Mikey said as Leo hovered around him, propping him up with pillows. He was so well supported that it looked like he was being swallowed by a nest of cushions and blankets.

"They will not judge you, son," Splinter said as he took a seat on the other end of the couch across from him. "I do not believe that it will hurt, but I do not know what will happen."

She was sitting on Casey's lap and looked up at Don who was rolling his eyes. "Has Splinter hypnotized any of you before?"

"No. Hasn't tried either."

"There's always a first time for everything," Raph said, sounding unusually positive. "This is a brilliant idea, Casey."

"I'm full of brilliance," he said, bouncing her on his knee.

Splinter got off the couch and stood next to Mikey. He checked his pockets and then mumbled something to himself. "Raphael…"

Raph was instantly at his side. "Yes?"

"I need something shiny. Anything really. I have an old pocket watch in my room in the…"

"On it." He ran into Splinter's bedroom. They were all quiet as they listened to him rummaging through Splinter's things. He was back within ten seconds and handed an old pocket watch on a chain to Splinter.

Everyone took a seat, trying to get comfortable. Splinter had told them that they were not allowed to speak or move until he gave them permission and they had no idea how long it would take to hypnotize him.

"Relax, son," Splinter said as he dangled the watch in front of Mikey's face.

He was reclining in his bower of pillows and so he was looking down his nose at the watch. "This feels awkward," he said.

"Relax. Do not worry."

April's brain fell asleep and she wondered if Splinter was actually hypnotizing the rest of them accidentally. But before she knew it, he had waved a hand at them and she heard the others let out a breath of relief. Mikey's eyes were closed and he appeared to be asleep. She thought it would be funny if all he'd done was bore him into a nap.

But then his eyes snapped open and he sat bolt upright with more energy than any of them had seen in at least a week.

She heard Raph gasp, "What the fuck?"

"What is your name?" Splinter asked him.

Mikey looked at him momentarily, but then his eyes changed direction. He was looking at Raph.

"What is your name?" Splinter asked again.

Mike looked at Splinter and said in a loud, but flat tone, "Name?"

"Yes, do you have a name?" Splinter put the watch in his pocket.

"Why would I? There is no need for a name. I have no reason to be remembered."

Again Mike's gazed turned to Raph.

Splinter sat on the other end of the couch. "I understand that you have been haunting my sons. I would like to know why."

"Haunting?" Mike asked. It sounded a little more like a curious statement. April realized that her palms were sweating. His expression was so unlike himself. Distant, yet focused and attentive. The sweetness was all gone. "I do not haunt anything. I only come to claim what is mine."

"And what is yours?" Leo asked. She jumped. She had forgotten that they were all allowed to speak.

"You don't know?" Mike asked, amused. "You gave him to me. You gave me your child in exchange for the life of the other."

Leo gave Mikey away? "You're lying," she said.

"No, he isn't," Leo said. She knew from the tone of his voice that something was very wrong. He sounded like he was about to break into tears. "He's right. It is my fault. How could I be so stupid? How did I forget that? I thought it was just a stupid dream."

"Do tell," Raph said. He didn't sound as compassionate towards his tears as she was feeling.

Mikey smiled at Raph. April snarled at him defensively. It was a predatory smile that she didn't want aimed at any of her family. "Well, it certainly isn't you. It is this one." He thumped his own plastron. "His own child."

"Hey, wait up," Don said. He even came forward and stood next to Splinter. "Mikey is Splinter's child. Not Leo's, so whatever he said doesn't apply. Don't let the door hit you on the ass."

Mikey sighed out of his nose and looked up at Don with disdain. "Your brain is nothing but rows and columns."

"I'm devastated by that insult," Don said, his sarcasm and impatience rising. Splinter took a hold of his arm and he took a breath before starting again. "I don't see your point. How can Leo give Mikey away when he doesn't have the authority?"

Mikey looked back at Raph again as he spoke. Raph's arms were crossed, but his hands were shaking.

"Because Hamato Michelangelo's parents were pet shop turtles. His father was run over by a car after his young owner tired of him and released him outdoors and his mother died in an overcrowded pet store tank. But that is irrelevant. He is loved by two parents. You, Hamato Splinter, and, you, Hamato Leonardo."

Splinter's whiskers flicked in agitation. "This still does not give Leonardo any…"

"Have you not provided him with the authority yourself?" Mikey said. His empty tone made her want to slap him. "You have given him more authority than a common oldest child. He perceives himself to be a parent and so he is. After all, isn't the mind what really shapes reality?" He finished addressing Leo and then diverted his gaze back to Raph.

"Why are you staring at me? Cut it out!"

"Raphael, calm yourself," Splinter said. "This has gone far enough." He reached into his pocket.

"You are the killer," Mikey said. He weakly raised his arm and pointed at Raph.

"I AM NOT A KILLER!" Raph said at the top of his lungs. Don jumped a few inches in the air.

She expected Splinter to chastise him, but instead he studied Mikey's face for a reaction.

"Did you not often wish as a child that Michelangelo would die or disappear? Your thoughts have power to shape the world. You should be proud."

"You wished that…" Leo started.

April shushed him. She felt like her brain was running in overdrive as a new and horrible idea cycled through, taking shape.

"Won't they all be relieved when you are gone? You take so much and give back so little."

They all just stared at Mikey, shocked by the words he was saying and unable to think of anything to do. "Why don't you shut up? I know what you're planning and we're not going to let it happen," she said.

"You are the sister," Mike said, without much interest. "I do not care what you know. You cannot protect him from himself. You know how weak he is. But Hamato Leonardo, there is a way to save both of them. Give me the child that you took from me."

"Are you kidding?" Leo didn't even consider it.

She looked back to see Raph was staring the ground, impassive as if he weren't listening.

"I do not joke. If you are not willing to provide me with that child, then supply another. I want a child."

"Why?" Casey asked. It was the really obvious question that they had all forgotten to ask.

"I eat them."

April was surprised at such a straightforward answer. She was prepared for a longwinded philosophical speech about the nature of good and evil.

Leo took a step forward, looking like the determined hero. "There is no way in hell that I would ever trade another life for the life of one of my brothers. We will find a way to stop you. I give you my word, upon my honor."

"Your honor is strong," Mikey said. "But it is irrelevant. There is no way to stop me." He said the last sentence directly to Raph, who hadn't moved or changed expression since he'd fallen silent and April was relieved to see that he wasn't letting its words get to him. It had picked a hard mark, she thought.

"Shut this down, Master," Don said, waving his arms at Mikey, as if trying to drive off a bad smell.

Splinter snapped his fingers and Mike collapsed back in his blankets instantly. After about a minute, he opened his eyes and blinked at them all, the familiar innocence back in his expression. "You guys are done already? It didn't work, did it? Now you're all gonna tease me."

April heard retching. Raph had doubled over and vomited violently.


	10. Chapter 10

_I know Raph has a motorcycle in every incarnation, but I just can't see Splinter allowing it. I think the idea of them being ninjas gets shunted aside too much in favor of cool toys. Plus, I don't buy the idea that Leo is totally selfless and upright._

_Suicide note fail. _That's all that Raph had written on one of the last few pages of the notebook. He took another swig of his beer and marveled at his own incompetence. He'd assumed he would have too much to say.

He'd definitely had too much to say, but it didn't make any sense.

_Give Mikey my comic books. He'll be dead, won't he? Never mind._

He started a new page. Maybe a list of regrets would be better. There were enough of them to fill a book.

_I'm dying a virgin here and I'd like to give fate a swift kick in the balls for that._

Then nothing. He needed to add a few more in case somebody found this list after he was gone and assumed that the only thing he missed about life was that he never had sex. Regrets.

_I owe lots of money to the mob and I regret that just because they'll probably come after you guys to collect on it when I'm gone. If a guy comes by April's apartment trying to deliver flowers from Bald Tony, Johnny No Thumbs or Zippo the Sicilian, don't answer the door. Call Leo and he'll kick their collective asses. Oh, and Leo. You could probably collect on my debts. Skeezy Pete, Young Jerry and Sissy Hallowell all owe me money. I'll write down how to find them. Never look Young Jerry's Rottweiler in the eye._

That was the only thing he had to say to Leo? Don't look a Rottweiler in the eye? What else had he said to him in the previous suicide note fails? Nothing. He'd told April that he wasn't in love with her because for some reason he'd felt obliged to do so even though he knew that it wasn't in dispute and he'd told Casey that he would come back and haunt him for eternity if he left her or hurt her. He also demanded that April name her first born son after him.

_I never got to ride a motorcycle. I always wanted one, but Splinter said it was too loud for a ninja. Guess he was right._

He needed to say something nice to Splinter now.

_Master Splinter, I regret that I wasn't a better son. _

Wasn't that the truth?

_I wish I could have watched that last "Matrix" movie. Why did you guys send it back to Netflix before I got to see it?_

Sounded petty. Scratched it out.

He heard the miniscule sound of a fellow ninja approaching and gathered up his notebook, pen and beer, sneaking further down the tunnel. He knew Leo was following him. He couldn't stand to be near anyone, seeing their pitying looks. Leo was in full on "mom-face." The idea of being caught with a notebook filled with failed suicide notes was so humiliating that he blushed at the idea.

The sound disappeared and he knew that Leo had given up for the moment. He settled back down to hurry and write down a few more failed attempts before he was forced to move again.

_Don, you're an asshole when you try to look smart. So stop._

Well, that was really nice. He erased it so hard that it tore the paper.

_Don, you're a good boy._

It looked really stupid on the page, but it felt true. He turned the page.

Raph had no real intention of dying or killing himself. He'd been locked in his room all morning, listening to loud and overly exuberant music to drown out Mikey's groaning. Casey and April were hovering over him as if he were their own child and watching them together was making him ill. They kept holding hands and flirting. It gave him the creeps.

Don had been sitting in the lab with Master Splinter. Don was muttering to himself like a schizophrenic and Splinter was methodically reading the case files over and over, most likely hoping that something would jump out at him.

Mike was much worse today. He wouldn't acknowledge anyone when they spoke to him and whimpered when he was touched. He'd watched as April had checked on his bruises, which were spreading down his legs. His chest tightened up in vicarious pain at the memory of it.

Leo had been wandering around the living room as if he couldn't remember where he was, but all the time keeping a watchful on Raph. He knew he was being babysat and had told him that if he decided to off himself, he'd be sure the let him know first so that he could properly criticize his technique. He'd expected a rebuke, but Leo just stared. He knew that he was too tired to argue.

_Leo…_

Why was nothing coming to him?

It had seemed like a fun and rather perverse game at first. He knew that Leo wasn't willing to leave him alone and so he had grabbed a notebook and a beer and gone out in the tunnels to write a suicide note to bring back and wave under his brother's nose.

And now he'd been sitting in the tunnels for at least three hours writing absolute garbage while Leo stood probably twenty feet away listening to him, and then advancing when he suspected that he'd lost his wariness. Then Raph would move further down the tunnel, waiting for Leo to advance again.

It was better than sitting in the lair while everybody waited for him to cut his wrists.

Maybe the beer was beginning to work, but he'd hoped it would have the opposite effect. He wanted to come up with a joke to bring back to show Leo that it was cool. He wasn't going to die. He wasn't selfish enough for that. He wrote something down and read it back.

_ I love you too much, so that's probably why I hate you._

What the fuck? That wasn't funny at all. He crossed it out.

The only problem with the tunnels was that they were quiet. Maybe that's what it was like to be dead. Just nothing. Maybe his soul would just evaporate or disintegrate. He'd rather be in hell than nowhere at all.

Then he felt his beer pried out of his fingers.

"Damn," he muttered to himself as Leo drained the rest of the bottle.

Leo sat next to him. He took Raph's pen and paper and said, "I'm going to write you're epitaph."

Raph patiently waited while Leo scribbled and then handed back the notebook. Even Leo's scribbling was neat and elegant. It said, _Hamato Raphael: World Class Drama Queen._

"I used to wish Mikey would die all the time," Raph said. "I hadn't even thought about it for a long time, you know. When he was a kid he was so…" He made a strangling motion in the air.

"You wished him dead two days ago." Leo's voice was loud and echoed down the tunnel.

Raph didn't answer. He looked down at the notebook full of excuses and self-justification. "I don't remember that."

"I do. It would be easier for you if he'd just hurry up and die."

It would be easier for everybody. Why did he think these things?

Leo sighed loudly and took put the bottle to his mouth. It was empty and he looked disappointed. "Raph, if anything happens to you…"

Oh, no. Leo wanted to talk about his feelings. His emotional bonding alarm bells roared to life and he pulled his body away a few inches to physically demonstrate his desire to withdraw from the conversation.

He didn't take the hint. "I'm tired of doing the right thing."

Wow. Didn't expect that.

"I don't want you to die because I'm too selfish to lose you. I'd be alone."

Creeped out now. Maybe if he pretended he wasn't there, he would shut up.

"I know that that thing will take Mike and there's nothing I can do."

He stared at the notebook hoping that his silence would soon put an end to the speech. His hope to avoid the subject diminished when the pitch of Leo's voice rose into borderline hysterics.

"What happens after he's gone? What am I going to do? You have to be there. You just have to. It can't be any other way. I don't know how to work if you're not around. I would never leave you alone and you know it."

Raph blocked out his emotional blather by replaying old Queen songs over in his head. But it really wasn't enough to drown him out once he realized that he was actually crying and hyperventilating. He looked the other way, watching a grand-daddy-long-legs making its way up the wall. Normally he would have shrieked, but it was better to watch a spider than listen to Leo crying. Why was he bitching about needing him so badly anyway? He was such a bad listener. It seemed like he could just replace him with a hat stand and get better emotional support.

He wrote on his notepad, _Hamato Leonardo: World Class Cry Baby_ and offered it to his brother.

"Look," Raph said. "You don't have to keep stalking me. I've been not-killing myself for sixteen years now. I've got the hang of it. I think we should be with Mike in case something happens." Raph staggered up, yelping when he realized that he'd brushed up against the grand-daddy-long-legs. He looked back in time to see Leo throw the beer bottle against the opposite wall with all his strength, shattering it.

* * *

Just as Raph had expected, April and Casey were nuzzling in an armchair. He cleared his throat loudly as he entered the lair, but they didn't acknowledge him.

"Where's Leo?" April asked, after she came up for air long enough to realize that he was there.

"I don't know. He took off." He wondered how many times Leo had said that about him.

"Took off?" said Casey "Tactless" Jones. "Wow, it's like he's turning into you."

Raph stood in the middle of the room listening to Mikey's strained breathing and Don's psychotic muttering from the lab. What should he do? It didn't feel respectful to have fun, so he couldn't go into the dojo. It was like he should be doing something, but he couldn't remember what.

Normally, in this situation he would be cracking skulls open in revenge or to gather information to save his brothers. There was no ass to kick this time. He needed something to do.

"Master Splinter," he said, venturing cautiously into the lab. His father was sitting at a table covered in papers and books. Don's work station was covered in half-full coffee cups.

"Yes," both Don and Splinter answered. Splinter glared at Don's shell.

"Find anything?" Raph picked up an incomprehensible book and threw it down. He never liked going into the lab. It made him feel unnecessarily stupid.

"Not yet," Splinter said. He was reading one of the case files again. Raph wondered what exactly he was hoping to get out of reading it over and over.

"Eat anything that wasn't caffeinated lately, Don? Like maybe a vegetable?" he asked. Maybe if he took away his coffee it would shut him up.

Don shifted the three books that were stacked open in his lap and didn't answer. Raph grabbed an interesting bit of metal and wires and tossed it in the air, catching it behind his back and bouncing it into the air with his foot.

"I wonder why Mikey's all bruised," Don said, still looking down at his books.

"Yeah, if it's going to eat him, it seems like it would want him in good shape. Better flavor and all." Raph dropped the part on the floor.

"What are you doing? Don't touch anything!"

Raph sat on the car seat. "This is why I don't come in here." Too stupid.

"Quit fidgeting," Don said, as he restacked his books so that he could read two at once.

Raph reclined and grimaced as he leaned on his sai and it poked him in the leg. "I bet it wants to lighten him up. Mikey's not child sized."

Nobody responded. Raph sighed. He actually had a valid idea for once. He'd expected bells to ring and a choir to sing. "Did you hear me, ass wipe?"

"Raphael, language," Splinter muttered.

"No, what?"

"It eats children right? And Mikey's certainly not a child. He's probably too big for a ball of shadow to carry."

Splinter looked up at him and Raph could see the wheels turning in his mind. "He is a ninja. There is no way that the creature could take him without a fight otherwise. I believe you are right, Raphael."

"Here's a gold star, Raph," Don said, not bothering to look up from his book.

Raph was approaching that dangerous borderline where his annoyance turned into bloodshed. "Don, can't you see what I'm getting at?"

Long pause. "Huh?" Still not looking up from his book.

Raph took the books off his lap and threw them across the room. Master Splinter was off his stool and across the room in a second.

"I will not have any violence! We are trying to help you and Michelangelo! Pick up those books!"

He restacked the books, throwing them on the ground with as much force and noise as he could muster without upsetting the pile. He dumped them hard into Don's lap, hoping it left a mark.

"Did Leo find that address he was looking for?" Don asked, oblivious to Raph's aggression.

"Address?" Splinter asked. "I was unaware that he was searching for someone. Did he tell you why he wanted it?"

"Said he wanted to check up on that kid that he traded Mike for to make sure she's okay." Don opened his books again and continued his pointless research.

"Raphie, is that you?" asked a small voice.

Mikey was leaning against the doorframe. Raph physically started at the dark bruises that covered his arms and legs. His eyes looked huge, like they had grown and he realized that he must have lost more weight than they had estimated. All three of them flew to the door, just in time to catch him as he fell. "I thought I heard Raph."

"You did. I'm here. See."

"I can't see you." His eyes closed as he passed out.

Raph carried him back to the couch with little trouble. He whirled around at April who had been snoozing in her arm chair and stared at him with red and sleepy eyes. "What the hell happened!" he yelled, conveying rage. He wasn't really mad but it seemed like shouting and gesturing wildly was a better course of action than looking disappointed and sad.

"I'm sorry. This chair is a lot more comfortable than the one in the library. I'll get some Mountain Dew." She stiffly scuffled into the kitchen and grabbed a two liter from the refrigerator, chugging half the bottle without thinking of the germs of the previous owner. _Yup, that's our sister_, he thought.

"Hey, where's his body guard?" Raph asked, looking around for the warrior they had left in charge of his brother's safety.

The toilet flushed and Casey exited the bathroom doing up his fly. "Anything happen?"

Raph winced as he felt Mikey's cold fingers grasping at his hand. "Raphie," he said. "Please don't leave. Where's Leo?"

"I won't leave," he said, sitting on the floor, letting Mikey hold his hand.

He knew that Mike didn't sleep anymore, but he would sit there all day if that's what it took.

_ "Stop pinching me! I wish you would die!" _

_ Hamato Raphael: World Class Drama Queen._


	11. Chapter 11

_It's been pointed out that Raph has sort of taken over a little bit more. I didn't anticipate it. That's just how stories go when they work out. They go where you don't expect them to go. I know I tend to favor Raph a little bit overall though and I'll try to pay attention to that tendency._

_ What about pills?_

Sounds too slow, Raph thought. And Don would pump his stomach if he found him before they had worked.

_What about hanging?_

Sounds too hard. There weren't any places to do it in the lair and he wasn't really fond of the idea of slow suffocation.

_What about Seppuku?_

Maybe. No. He wasn't honorable enough for that.

_ You should cut your wrists. It's guaranteed to work if you cut deep enough._

Good idea.

"Raph, who are you talking to?" Casey asked through his bedroom door.

Had he been talking out loud?

"Nobody. I'm going to… take a nap."

The doorknob vibrated as Casey tried to force the door. Why was he sitting in here thinking about suicide methods?

"Come out!" Casey yelled with unnecessary volume. "April thinks you're dead!"

"This is Raph's ghost!" Raph yelled, even louder. "Fuck off!"

He could hear Casey move away from the door and a minute later there was a soft knock on the door. "Raph, honey," said April's sweetest tone of voice. "You okay in there? You know that Leo doesn't want you to be alone."

"How's Mike?"

"Same," she said. "Well, no. He's…" She stopped, probably because Mikey was in the same room with them. "He's awfully weak. Maybe you should come out and sit with him again."

_It wouldn't make any difference. He can't even tell if you're there or not anyway._

"What's the point?" he asked the door.

"Don and Splinter are out here. You're locked up in here and Leo's gone. You should all be out here with him."

_ I know where your honorable leader is. _

"Where?" Raph asked.

April sounded confused. "In the living room, dumbass."

Why did his arm hurt so much? It had stung for quite a while now.

"Look," April said. "I promise we won't talk to you or look at you or acknowledge your presence, okay. It just feels… you know… safer if we're all together. And we miss you."

That woman definitely knew how to work him, he thought as he opened the door.

April smiled as he opened the door slightly and looked through the crack. He looked past her to make sure there wasn't going to be a family ambush as soon as he opened the door. Mikey was on the couch, Don was splayed out on his stomach on the floor surrounded by a halo of books. He couldn't see Sensei, but could hear him moving in the kitchen. Casey was hooking up a video game. He stepped out into the living room.

"Maybe you two can play…" April said. Her smile faded and her eyes fell to his midsection. "What did you do! DON!"

His left hand felt warm and wet for a second before he looked down and understood why. He felt April snatch the sai out of his right hand, which was dripping with his own blood. The pain of the gashes in his left arm hit him. Don's fingers prodded painfully at the wounds.

"How did this happen?" Splinter demanded, holding out his bloody sai in front of his face.

"I don't remember."

Everyone was standing around him, grabbing at him and yelling. He shoved Don away and moved towards the front door of the lair, leaving a blood trail behind him.

"Don't you dare leave," said Master Splinter.

He stopped in his tracks at his father's iron clad tone.

_Lie down. It won't hurt. You knew this was coming._

_

* * *

_

Miona's foster family had a nice house. A white house in the suburbs with a large lawn and wood chipped flower beds. It would be nice to have a house with white vinyl siding and plush carpet and hard wood floors.

Should he go in and see Miona? What was the point?

He climbed up onto the roof of the front porch before he answered the question. He looked in one of the dormer windows. There were her pretend parents, asleep in bed. Middle aged people with jobs and no ninja clan vengeance keeping them hidden underground. They had a nice bed. Lots of throw pillows.

Miona was asleep in the next dormer window. Her room was yellow, a gender neutral color for the temporary babies in transit through their lives. Leo tried the window and found that it was open. Wouldn't it be nice to be that trusting? Always expecting to be alive the next day. Expecting that nobody hated you enough to kill you.

He stood in front of Miona's crib, watching her sleep. She was curled up on her side, with a stuffed animal in her arms. Mikey was sixteen and he still slept like that. She stirred and he looked towards the open window.

"Mommy," she said, reaching up to him.

This child had cost him two of his brothers. Why was her life worth more than theirs?

He leaned down and she put her arms around his neck as he picked her up. He'd forgotten how comforting it felt to have a small, warm creature pressed again his chest.

There was a wooden rocking chair in the corner and he sat down, holding her over his shoulder. He rocked slightly, making sure not to cause any creaking or sounds that would attract her fake parents.

"I'm going to tell you a story," he said, yawning widely. "It's about two brothers. They were twins called the Dioscuri. Polydeuces was the son of a god and so he was immortal, but his half brother and twin Castor was mortal. They were warriors and together they were unstoppable. Polydeuces was a violent man with a strong temper and Castor was gentle and kind."

Miona was asleep again.

"But one day, Castor fell in battle. And Polydeuces' grief was so severe that he knew he couldn't survive without his brother, even if he was immortal. So he persuaded the gods to allow them to share his immortality. Every other day they spent with the gods and every other day they spent with the dead. I can't forgive Polydeuces for his weakness."

The door opened but Leo didn't move. He could feel that it wasn't the parents. There were no footsteps. A shape of a man stood in the door way. The hall light illuminated the black outline of what should have been there, but wasn't.

"Have you come to renounce our deal?" it asked. He could barely hear its voice, but knew exactly what it said.

He didn't answer, but looked over at Miona's little face. It would be so easy to just hand her over. Mikey would be well again and Raph wouldn't be in any danger from himself. She was small and helpless.

"How do I know that you will even honor our deal?" Leo asked.

"I always honor my agreements."

So this thing had some sense of honor. That was interesting, but completely unhelpful. "If I did hand her over to you," Leo said. "What would happen?"

"I would eat her," it said simply.

His grip on her tightened. "Would you leave us alone?"

"Yes. But the damage has already been done to your family. Individually you are all so weak. Especially that rabid animal that you call a brother. What do you think he has been busying himself with in your absence?"

His stomach tightened. This was wrong. He was wasting his time. He wasn't seeing something obvious. Why was it taking the time to taunt him like this?

Leo woke up and looked around himself. Miona was asleep and drooling on his plastron and the first grey light of morning was on the horizon.

_Individually you are all so weak. They were warriors and together they were unstoppable. What do you think he has been busying himself with in your absence?_

He laid Miona carefully in her crib, his heart pounding with the excitement of an answer found.

* * *

"How do you cut on yourself without noticing?" Don asked as he pulled the thread though Raph's arm.

"Well, it helps if you hear voices," Raph said.

April was sitting nearby, balancing a book on her head. "My skull is really flat. We should get out the calipers again and measure my cranial capacity," she said.

Don felt like he was in a nightmare where they were all slowly losing their minds. And then suddenly, Leo was standing dramatically in the doorway of the lab, looking mildly crazed. He wondered dully if he'd been attacked by the Loch Ness Monster or Sasquatch.

"I have an idea," Leo said. "Where's Sensei?" He looked around as if he was hiding in a cupboard.

"He's playing Egyptian Ratscrew with Casey. Don't ask," April said, the book on her head sliding off onto the floor as she turned to look at Leo.

"We're going… Raph! What happened to your arm?"

"Where were you all night?" Raph asked in return.

Don said, "Raph sliced himself with his sai. On purpose, we think. We're not sure."

Leo didn't look very concerned. Don knew that he'd seen Raph getting stitches at least twenty times. "Is Mikey still…?"

"Yeah, he's still alive," April said. "That feels so wrong to say."

"Good, good," Leo said, mumbling absently to himself. "This will take all five of us."

Don sighed with relief. Finally, a plan.

* * *

An hour later, Don sat staring at Leo with his mouth hanging open thinking, We all must be losing our minds. That's the plan?

"It follows a code of honor," Leo repeated again. "And if it's bound by terms and conditions of contracts, then we can bend those terms."

"Basically, you want to trick the devil," Casey said, scratching his head.

Don stood up, his panic increasing at the second by the task set before him. "I don't think I can do it. It's barely communicated with me." He covered his mouth at the slip.

"Barely?" Raph asked. Then shouted, "BARELY! YOU'VE BEEN TREATING ME LIKE A LUNATIC AND YOU'VE SEEN IT TOO?" Mikey stirred in his blankets at the sound and Raph leaned over and patted his leg. "Sorry, kid."

"Don't call him a kid," Leo said. "He's sixteen."

Raph didn't seem to hear him.

Don was too worried about himself to notice the odd exchange and said, "I've only seen it once in a dream and then I just ignored it. I don't think I can do this."

"You five have all seen it," Splinter said, his fingers on his chin, thinking.

Don knew that their father would approve of the plan. He decided to try a different tactic. "Leo, this all rests on your performance, you know. Do you think you can manage it?"

"I will if I have to," Leo said, drawing himself up to his full height and looking unusually impressive.

Damn, Don thought. He's all confident in his capability. This would never work and he knew he would be the one to fail them all.


	12. Chapter 12

_Kinda drops off because I was planning on adding the next plot piece in this chapter but I'm going to move it to the next because I'm too hungry to go on._

"This still doesn't make any sense to me," Don said dogmatically, sitting in the dojo with his arms crossed at Leo to physically demonstrate his unwillingness to participate.

"It makes perfect sense," April said. She sighed, staring at the floor, her forehead contracted with worry.

Don looked to Raph for support. He was picking at the bandages on his wrist and wasn't listening.

Leo said again, not quite as patiently as the last time, "It comes to us mostly in our sleep because we're alone and without outside influence. That's why it only speaks to Raph and Mikey in ways that we can't hear. It does the most damage by playing our own fears and because our fears are specific to us, it doesn't… you know… like an audience."

"I get that part," Don said. "And it makes sense. But that's not what I think is nonsensical. It's this." He motioned to the four of them sitting in a circle in the dojo.

Raph looked up from his stitches and at Leo. "Yeah, it sounds impossible. It sounds dangerous to you too. I'm all for danger normally, but this is danger to your brain and that's something else. We kind of need your brain."

Leo was both touched at his concerned for his mental wellbeing and also annoyed at the doubt expressed in his capability. "Well, this session isn't about me. It's about April."

She hung her head. "Please don't say that."

Raph looked accusingly at Leo. "Yeah, the whole plan is resting on your shoulders, April. No pressure."

"I should have tried meditating before," she said, picking nervously at her fingernails.

"Well," Leo said, secretly agreeing with her. "You didn't know that it would be important in the future. Now, close your eyes and relax and I'll come find you. Just clear your mind and I should be able to make a connection."

She tried to smile confidently, but it just made him sad. So he closed his eyes and waited to pick up on her mental wavelength. Just when he was nearly relaxed enough to block out his surroundings he heard, "What are we supposed to do?"

His eyes snapped open. April looked around for the source of the interruption.

"What are we supposed to do?" Don asked again.

"Interrupt so that we don't get anything done," Leo said. He was tired he hoped he wouldn't fall asleep yet.

"Well, we'll sit and look pretty," Raph said.

They started again. Leo sat so long in mental darkness by himself, that he wondered if they had all gotten sick of it and left him there alone in the dojo. Then he heard:

_ He'll be able to hear whatever I'm thinking. That's weird. No wonder they're so close. They just sit around listening to each others' brain waves all the time. Is there nothing he can't do? Besides sing? Why would Raph cut on himself like that? Don't worry so much, Leo…_

He was taken aback by the direct address.

_ I have full faith in you and I'll go wherever you lead. He's too young to think things like that._

He opened his eyes and looked at her. Think what things?

"Did it work?" Don asked, bored. He and Raph were sitting with their legs outstretched towards each other and the palms of their feet pressed together like they used to do when they were little to see who had the biggest feet. Still Raph.

"Think what things?" Leo blurted out.

"Yeah, guess so," Raph said. "Way to go, girl. Took me years to get it and you got it in one go. I'm really jealous. Let me go cut on myself to release my angst."

Don kicked him. "Don't joke about that!"

Leo was still searching April for an answer. She looked away from him. He was clearly unaware of some heavy thoughts that he'd had. Did that always happen? "I can't even really explain it. I mean, I don't know what you meant by it, but it sounded… kind of bad," she said.

"Let it go, Leo," Don muttered. "You think weird stuff all the time that we don't tell you about."

It was quiet for a minute as Leo stewed in his own anxiety. He had innumerable thoughts that he didn't want anyone else to be a part of and he wondered now if his belief that his thoughts were so well controlled and veiled in group meditation was completely false.

"Mostly," Raph said slowly. "You just worry about stuff. And most of the time you're worrying about what we think of you. Like about stuff that you've done or are going to do."

"Yeah," Don said. "Your brain makes me nervous."

He wouldn't let this go. "What was I thinking?"

She sighed through clenched teeth. "You said, 'Of course this won't work. One of them will fuck up this plan, like every other.'"

"Hey!" Raph said, rising to his feet. "Sometimes you fuck up plans too, you know. And mostly we fuck up as a collective effort."

Leo sagged under his guilt. "I'm sorry."

Don joined in with, "And you were just making it sound like I was the stupid one because I had doubts about the plan. You're such a hypocrite. I have to check on Mikey. You know, our brother who's dying."

Raph and Don stomped out of the dojo, leaving Leo sitting on the floor across from April.

"It's okay to have doubts," she said. "I would actually be more worried if you didn't."

"You have too much faith in me," he said, slumping down even more. He felt like sliding flat on his face and lying there. "How am I going to do this?"

Her eyes were sad and watery and he was afraid she would hug him.

"I need caffeine. Have to stay awake." He left the dojo and stared vacantly into the refrigerator, unseeing.

* * *

Later that night, Leo sat in Splinter's bedroom. Incense burned on the bureau and it wasn't helping him stay focused. He could feel his eyes rolling up in his head and fought to keep them open.

"You know the risks involved in this," Sensei said.

"Yes, Sensei," he answered automatically.

"You are not only putting yourself at risk, but also the others who are involved."

"I know." He didn't want this pep talk. He just wanted to get it over with.

"You must be careful. You know how strongly Raphael's emotions run and he will be hardest to control. But Michelangelo's mental state is anyone's guess and I cannot tell you what to expect. It may be too hard for him to participate at all."

Leo's chest tightened at the idea and he felt like he was having a heart attack.

"April is so new to this that I am not sure that you will be able to maintain a connection with her for very long. And Donatello…" Master Splinter spun his whiskers with his fingers as he thought. "He is possessive of his thoughts and may unconsciously force you away from him."

"I know all of this, Sensei," Leo said.

"Well, I thought that it bore reiterating."

"We'd better get started." He was too tired for goodbyes and knew that Master Splinter wouldn't burden him with one.


	13. Chapter 13

_It's hard to get into this extremely abstract frame of mind and I apologize if the tone is a little more off from the others._

Leo couldn't remember ever being so tired and he felt like crying from the despair of exhaustion. But he knew it was necessary. It was just another impossible task in the endless parade of impossibilities that he needed to accomplish on a daily basis.

He sat on the floor next to Mikey, who was staring into the corner, his eyes half closed. He was totally unresponsive. How would they even move him into the dojo without doing damage, let alone get him to meditate?

They were running out of time and still Leo didn't feel prepared.

Casey was sitting in the living room armchair, watching "This Old House" and April was on the floor, leaning against his leg with a book about Jungian archetypes on her lap. "I can't help but feel that this is important in some way that we aren't grasping," she said to herself.

"Yeah," Casey said. "It's always a bad idea to put in flooring when it's humid and the boards swell."

She ignored his lame joke.

Leo decided to check on Raph again to see if he had gone through any change since he had last seen him. True, he had checked on him three minutes ago, but anything could happen in three minutes. But before he could go to the dojo to observe Raph attacking the punching bag, he heard Raph's voice say, "In case anybody cares, it's really eager to kill Mike all of a sudden. So I think we need to do this now."

"Eager?" Don said as he drifted aimlessly through the lair. "What's it saying?"

"It's reciting 'The Gettysburg Address,'" Raph said, rolling his eyes. "It knows we're up to something and it wants to get rid of him before we can do it. So somebody help me get Mikey into the dojo. We're doing this now."

"I think we should have a little talk first…" Leo said. He didn't want to be the one responsible for making any of them vegetables because they had panicked and didn't prepare properly.

"Damn it, Leo!" Raph said, taking Mike in his arms and lifting him with no trouble. He went straight for the dojo. "It's going down now or not at all. Get Master Splinter. Don, walk in front of me." He stopped suddenly.

"Why?" Don asked, not moving.

"Well," he stammered, sounding slightly embarrassed. "It's hovering in front of me and I don't want to trip. It's like I'm half blind."

Even through Leo's total exhaustion, he could feel the urgency setting in and he left to fetch Master Splinter.

* * *

"You'll have to sit up for a while and concentrate, sweetheart," April said as they all worked together to prop Mikey up against the wall with blankets and pillows. All except for Raph who was sitting by himself, compulsively pulling out his stitches. He'd ripped off the bandage a few minutes ago. If he hadn't been so preoccupied with the preparation, Leo would have gotten after him for it. But it seemed minor now.

"I can't," Mikey wheezed. Leo tried to cover his arms and legs with a blanket. He felt physically ill when he saw them. It was like his blood was pooling up all over his body. But he knew that couldn't happen. He was still alive.

"We're going to save you and Raph," Leo said, patiently. "But you have to help. You're almost an adult and you have a responsibility to help us all. Just like we have a responsibility to help you."

"That's a little harsh," Don said uncertainly as he took his spot in the circle.

But Mikey nodded and said, "I'll try. But it'll be hard with that bastard whispering at me."

"Just try your best," April said, petting him before sitting down in the circle.

Casey was hovering near the wall, like he didn't know if he should go or stay. "This is possibly the strangest thing I've ever been a party to." He came forward and gave April a very thorough kiss.

"We don't have time for this," Raph said. "No time for goodbyes. Leo, sit down. We need to do it."

Leo sat down in the circle and looks around at them all. Four frightened face sat around him in a circle, expectantly waiting for orders. "We have to wait for Master Splinter's word before…"

There was a small sound in the far corner from behind Raph's weight rack. Leo's head snapped around as he saw a shape pass through his peripheral vision. He hated it when he was so tired that he thought he saw shadows moving and rubbed his eyes. But then he noticed that everyone else in the room was looking at the weight rack too. Even Casey.

"Do it now," Casey said. "Go on. What are you waiting for? Master Splinter!"

"Let's all close our eyes and relax…" Leo said, his throat tightening at the idea that the thing was physically in the room with them.

"Relax?" Casey said pointing at the weight rack. "How are we all supposed to relax with that thing in the room with us?"

Raph got to his feet and shouted, "Well, it's been here all the time. I've been saying it and I guess…"

"Raphael, sit down," Master Splinter said as he lit a stick of incense. He had entered the dojo and they had all been too distracted to notice. Not a good sign. "Do not worry, Casey. It cannot harm us. It does not want to."

Casey didn't sit down. He crossed the room and sat next to Splinter.

"Close your eyes," Splinter said. "And concentrate. Try to relax. How are you feeling, Michelangelo?"

His voice was very small and no one could hear his reply.

They sat in silence for a short while and Leo was so happy for the mental quiet of meditation that he had to force himself with all his strength not to fall asleep. He needed to wait until the other four were present. First, he heard Don's mind, thinking:

_Why do they tend to serve ham on Easter? I like ham. But it seems awfully insensitive to Jews since it isn't kosher. I wonder if Christians secretly blame Jews for Jesus' death and they unconsciously serve ham and are like, "Take that, Jews." Judgmental. Possibly racist. Redirecting. This won't work. Mikey's too weak and Raph's too crazy and April's too new to this. Why did Leo let this happen? It's his fault, not Raph's. Mean. Redirecting. It's getting pretty cold out for this time of the year…_

He was surprised to hear April's thoughts layered loudly over Don's next.

_This had better work. I don't think ham and Easter have anything to do with Jews. Where does he come up with this stuff? Leo, we all saw it. It wasn't just you. Poor Mikey. I can't believe how bad he is. Casey. Casey. What if I turn into a brain-dead amnesiac because of this? He'll leave me. Well, hopefully because I wouldn't even recognize him. But who would take care of me?_

Leo didn't enjoy hearing this much worry in his own head. His brain was usually loaded with enough worry for all of them and now he was going to have to bear the combined worry of them all. His thoughts were interrupted when he felt Raph's mind hit him like a speeding bullet and he almost retreated back into consciousness to escape.

_This had better work. Just lay down and die. Where do we keep the razor blades? We don't have any. I'll… no, I won't do that. Shut up. Mikey's dying. Fuck you, Leo. This is my fault. I should have done something. Mikey's dying. Fuck you, Leo. I'm a killer. I've killed lots of people. _

Raph's mind was cutting in and out and Leo was glad. It felt like a ton of bricks weighing him down.

Then Mikey's mind came into focus. Leo grabbed on as hard as he could, taking comfort in his contentment, while attempting to drown out Raph's panic.

_When I'm better maybe I'll go skateboarding. That would be cool. What level was I on in Halo? I hope they didn't erase my game. But that won't matter. I'll just start a new one. Halo's fun. I wish I could have some cheesecake. I wonder if we have the stuff for that…_

_…I don't want to be the sacrifice for this… find somebody else… _

_ …I don't think this is working. Raph's always been really bad at meditation. It's probably his fault. Blaming. Redirecting…_

_ …April Jones… Sounds boring… April O'Neil Jones… Sounds better. April O'Neil Hamato Jones… That's funny… Makes me sound like a character on a soap opera…_

_ …I'm so hungry. I wish I could have eaten all this weak. I wonder if they ate all the cream cheese. I'm so in the mood for dairy right now…_

_ …Mikey's dying. I am a killer. It's my fault…_

Leo couldn't contain himself any longer and retreated into the comforting blackness of sleep. He didn't even bother to hold onto the connections in his mind and felt a few slip away, but didn't care. He needed to be rid of some of the anxiety.

He could feel the thoughts of others stirring vaguely in the back of his mind, but didn't pay any attention. It was like the buzz of a distant fly. Finally, he could sleep. They were running out of time. It was nice to sleep. He wasn't Mikey's father.

He was sitting in a dirty and dimly lit subway car. It was empty. He could see the dark walls moving past as the subway car traveled.

It traveled, but he knew he wasn't getting anywhere.

THUMP.

He was sitting in the seat nearest the back of the car. He knew that something was waiting for him in the car behind him, but he didn't want to turn around to see what it was. Surely, he would die of fear when he did.

THUMP.

He needed to stop that noise. It was up to him.

THUMP.

It was coming from the animal at the front of his car. It was his job to take care of this pathetic creature.

He went to the front of the car and it took forever before he got there. Time was running out. He was wasting it here.

A wolf with ragged fur was throwing itself at one of the windows. The impact of its weight had made a large crater.

THUMP.

It threw itself at the glass and bounced back onto the floor of the subway car, this time leaving a blood spatter on the cracked glass.

Leo had to stop this. He bent down and tried to restrain the animal as it tried to take another jump. It lashed out at him, thrashing wildly. He held on tighter. He needed to keep it from hurting itself. He felt its muscles tighten into a solid mass as it bit and clawed his skin. But that was the risk that he had to take. The scars were worth it.

"You're all strength and no sense," he said to the wolf and he felt its strength fade and its body sagged in his arms. He held it to his plastron while it panted.

Then he looked up at the bloodied glass. There were words traced out in the window. He let the wolf go and it sat at his side, looking up also. He knew it was reading along with him.

_Redirecting. Redirecting. The New York Subway started operation on October 27, 1904. There are 468 stations. Not helpful. Redirecting. Shadow. Behind you._

The shape of a man was standing at the opposite end of the car, but Leo only had time to take a fleeting glance at him. He wouldn't look at it. He took a step in front of the wolf, putting himself between them.

The dark brick walls outside had disappeared. The car was moving silently through a deep and ancient forest. Ferns grew on the ground through the mist and the trees towered high above them, blocking out the light. He wished he could escape this car and stay in this place. It felt peaceful to him.

But the wolf moved near his feet and Leo turned to see it lunging for the shadow at the back of the train.

"No, stop!" he yelled. This wasn't the way.

Leo pulled himself off the floor of the dojo as his senses slowly came back to him. Raph and Don also struggled to get upright. Mikey was staring at them with wide and curious eyes and April looked wide awake.

"Where were you two?" Don asked.

"I'm sorry," Mikey said, his voice filling with tears. Leo wanted to rush over to him, but restrained himself. "Leo sort of dumped us when he fell asleep."

"Yeah, I tried to hold on," April said, shrugging. "But you took off without me."

"Well, what were you two doing?" Leo said loudly to Raph and Don. "I don't remember seeing either of you."

"I was there. Why did you wake us up?" Raph said, rubbing his eyes. "I nearly got the thing that time."

Don crossed his arms. "I was trying to think of something to do."

"You will do it again," Master Splinter said. Leo jumped slightly, forgetting that he was there. He wondered if he had a way of monitoring what they had been dreaming. He wouldn't be at all surprised and secretly didn't want to know.

"What do we do now?" Mikey asked.

They all looked to Leo. He wanted to look away.

"We'll do it again and it'll work," he said. It was it was his job to lie to them all.


	14. Chapter 14

_More of my personal disturbing dream imagery. I've been told that I have scary dreams. Took some cues from "Un Chien Andalou." If you like creepy abstract imagery, then you should go check it out. It's up for free online. Just Google it. The only excuse I can offer for any parts of Leo's dream with April is that he's male. Blame it on that. Don't know where the shaman thing came from. Kind of a cool idea, I guess. Filled a convenient plot hole. hehe_

Leonardo sat in front of the television next to Donatello and watched the static on the screen. "What are we doing?" Leo asked.

"Looking for answers and numbers and words. Sometimes they're words. Mostly numbers. Do you know how dangerous I am?"

He considered his brother for a second and analyzed his speed, strength, stamina and agility in comparison to his own. "Yes, I have an idea."

Don's face hardened. His soft brother. "I hope you know that I could kill you without touching you."

He turned back to the television, looking for the answers.

"What's the question?" Leo asked. He was afraid of the question. Don said to the television, "Do you know what I'm capable of?"

This was the old lair. The home he grew up in. Their growth charts were on the wall near the fridge. The marker on the brick. He left Don to his pointlessness and went out the door. He tripped over an old coffee can as he left.

* * *

The city was abandoned. Nothing but empty space. The people were all gone and their problems were over. The streets were devoid of life. It was perfect.

And there was Mikey, sitting in an orange sports car, motioning to him to join him. Leo sat in the passenger's seat and decided to drive to the car.

"I'm old enough to drive," Mikey said. "Just sit there and do what I say."

But Mikey didn't speak to him again. He drove until they were out of the city to the forest, where the world was still young and fear walked between the trees.

He watched Mikey and saw the bruises on his arms and legs. "How did that happen?"

"Don missed the pointless answers and now we're all going to pay."

"We can't stop here," Leo said. He watched as the world turned old and crumbled around him. He longed to stay in that perfect place. Free from his burdens. The burdens that had names.

* * *

Leo could hear whispering in his mind. It buzzed and bit at him like a nagging insect. He couldn't abide this noise and worry. The pain and panic. He had to leave. The clouds cut through the moon like a razor through an eye and he knew that somewhere Raph was bleeding. But he didn't care.

* * *

She was on a hilltop, watching her future gliding past. He joined her sometimes, pointing at the things she wouldn't have because of him.

This time she wore a wedding dress. She said, "You couldn't take this away from me, at least."

"If things were different," he said. "I would have given it to you myself."

He had to leave before this played out again. He's seen it before and wanted to keep it for himself. There were eyes on him here.

She led the way and deviated from his usual course. The anticipated warmth went out of his skin. She picked up a shovel and dug a hole. It was in a flower patch next to a white picket fence next to a yellow house next to a street. "What are you looking for?" he asked.

He didn't want to see what was in the hole. It was the question.

He climbed down into her hole. How did this dream start? Not in a hole. Usually in his room. He willed it to happen. Sometimes feeling soft hands and lips on his body was the only way to block out the day.

April leaned away from him and said, "Not in my dream, Fearless. Anyway, I've found it. Give this to Don." She handed him a snake wrapped into a circle. The end of its tail was in its mouth.

A robin landed on her shoulder and she brushed it away. He smiled.

* * *

The voices were louder than ever and demanded his attention. Pleaded with him for company. A roaring ache that wouldn't go away. He drove it away with as much force as he could.

* * *

Why was his bed in this place? An open room with light and normalcy. White walls and light fixtures. He needed to leave. There were people ready to kill him outside, but his body wouldn't move. His eyes traveled the room as he willed motion into his limbs, but nothing happened.

A hand pressed on his chest, cracking his ribs inside. Old enemies. Long dead rivals and vengeance cases surrounded his bed. All rotting and hating him for cutting their lives short. It was fair, wasn't it? Either his life or theirs? Why had he punished them for that? They reached down and tore at his skin.

They sliced through his plastron with no trouble at all.

He screamed until his voice wouldn't work and then all he could do was lie there watching them, drowning in his fear.

Then they moved aside. He felt something pull him off the bed and onto the floor and wrap its arms around him. Raph cradled him in his arms and pressed him so hard to his chest that Leo thought he would stop breathing. He didn't really mind and pressed his face into his brother's neck, soaking in the safety. He saw that the few toys they had as little children were under the bed, in the dark. The red truck.

They only had a few toys. The wheels fell off the red truck once. Leo was three. He cried. Raph hugged him so hard that he bruised. He was punished and never hugged him again.

But something was moving in the shadows under the bed and Raph pulled Leo to his feet, leading him unwillingly by the hand, through the dark hallway of the old house. The paint was peeling and the people stood aside to watch them pass. Leo bowed his head, avoiding their eyes and knew that Raph was absorbing all of their judgment for him.

They looked out the window and Leo saw the razor of clouds cut across the moon and Raph covered his wrists to hide the shame, but the blood leaked through his fingers anyway.

Leo turned away from him and looked up the stairs. They were lined with people, who watched them with cold expressions. Raph took him by the hand again and led him to a door. Leo didn't want to go inside. He could feel something festering on the other side of the wall that he didn't want to know. But Raph opened the door anyway. It was full of boxes of index cards. They were old and full of dust.

"I keep it all in here," Raph said. "I've memorized it all and cataloged it."

Leo's stomach boiled over with nausea at the idea. "You should get rid of these. Burn them."

Raph stuck a new card in an open box. He said, "Now there's a card for this." He motioned to his bleeding wrist.

Leo pulled a card out of the open box. He read: _I's sorry, Sensei. I didn't mean to hurt brother. He was sad and I's helping._

He pulled out another card:_ Well, maybe you should learn how to fucking sidestep. It ain't my fault that you got in my way. Like you've never been stabbed before anyway, you pussy._

And another: _Stop touching me, Mikey! I wish you would die!_

Another_: It took eight hits with the cattle prod to drop the red one. What a monster. _

And several of them simply read: _I'm sorry, Sensei_. Leo knew there were boxes of them.

Leo reached for the doorknob. The people were watching them through holes in the walls. Raph said, "They can look, but they'll never get in. The fortifications of this place are steep."

Leo wouldn't stay here. He opened the door, and the whispering was nearly deafening.

* * *

Rain was pouring down into the river and the glowing valley was lit up with the dull orange light of sunset. Mikey was sitting at the water's edge, dangling his feet in. Leo sat next to him.

"Why this place?"

"What better place to be in the end? It may be the end. Rather here than a stinky sewer drain. Did you ever notice that frogs only grow in the summertime and that I'll never grow up and that you always break toasters?"

A hand came out of the water. It was a girl, holding one of Leo's katanas. He was only half without it, but he didn't want to venture into the water to fetch it from her. She held it high above her head, waiting.

"Want me to get it?" Mikey asked, swinging his legs against the bank. "I'd be glad to do it."

Leo nodded. Mikey jumped into the water and swam easily to the middle of the lake. She handed the katana to him, while keeping her eyes on Leo. He cringed at his weakness. The sword was back in his hand and Mikey sat on the bank again.

"Ever notice how cars never make the same noise twice? Or how we all have sex dreams about April? Or how Master Splinter never really sent your pet rat to live with another family?"

* * *

"You still don't understand," Don said as they watched the babies in the hospital maternity ward. "You can't fight this." A television monitor on a nearby wall displayed nothing but static. Leo wondered if it was intended to show comforting images to appease the dying.

"But that's what I do. April gave you the answer." He handed the ringed snake to his brother, who held it in his hands and turned it over and over. Images flickered onto the screen behind him. Symbols and numbers and words that Leo couldn't identify.

Don looked back through the glass at the babies and said, "Now I have the question."

They watched as The Shadow hovered over the crib of a newborn, intent on devouring it.

Leo looked back at the television monitor. The clouds cut through the moon like a razor and then the orange car crashed into a tree. They were running out of time.

"I came to help," April said, looking through the window at the babies with them. "Unless you guys are too busy fantasizing about having sex with me. I could come back later." The Shadow bent over the crib, ignoring them. "You were born with the first conscious thought."

"I know I'm mature for my age," Leo said.

Don rolled his eyes and pointed at the absence of light in human form, hovering over the child. Leo bowed his head.

It turned towards them, its eyes glowing weakly. "When the first creature had something to hide from itself. I do a service. I protect you all."

Don pulled out his bo and broke the glass separating them from The Shadow. It didn't react. Just bent down over the baby again. As the glass fell to the ground, Don looked at Leo and said, "Because it's part of us all, it can't be killed. Only managed. Refused." Don looked back at the creature and said, "I am not the weak link in the chain, as you think. My mind turns this world. After all, doesn't perception shape reality?"

April climbed over the barrier, cutting her hands on the glass. Leo wouldn't follow. He had no desire to get any closer to this thing. "I want to know why you picked Raphael as the scapegoat," she said as she clamored over the broken glass to get closer to it.

"Because I am hidden thought," it said, from a million miles away, uncaring that she was getting closer. "More dirty things to play with."

Don jumped liquidly over the barrier. "Leo, come here. Stop being afraid of it. It's only you."

He knew that he would die of fear if he got any closer. He would see the contents of his own boxes, hidden away in dark rooms. April asked, "But why does it eat children? If you're projected thought…"

"I am a primitive creature. Others gave me strengths. I have been helped…"

The television flashed with bright lights and symbols that meant nothing to Leo.

Don said, "A shaman gave him corporeal form for his own purposes. Gave it a will of its own. But it also needed a means to survive."

The Shadow was frozen over the crib, its attention turned to the three of them. It worked its claw-like hands slowly, anticipating its kill. "It thought it could control me as a weapon. I am not a weapon."

Leo could clearly read the word "Ouroboros" on the television screen. He'd had enough of this cryptic nonsense. It was time to fight. He climbed over the barrier, drew his katanas and said, "I don't give shit how ancient you are or about the earliest state of mind or about the Lockian blank slate. Normally, I would be, but I don't care anymore. This is my mind and my dream and if what you say is true, then I'm the one who controls this space. I'm not under your sway. I'm not waiting for you to snatch my brother from me and rot the other from the inside out."

The room changed as he spoke. They were now into the dojo. He would rather be here. This was his kingdom.

The Shadow crouched down in the middle of the room, and crawled at him. Only now, when he looked at it directly, did he realize that is was just a pathetic creature with no life of its own. Just borrowed. Nothing but a parasite.

Leo said, "I rule this place and I say that you have no claim on Michelangelo. He isn't my possession. I have no children and he is not a child that needs to be protected. You lost this time. You have no claim on the first child and you have no claim to Mikey. And you will obey me because I'm the thing to be feared." He watched it as it writhed towards him, crushed by the power he emanated. "You can go now."

He walked to the back of the dojo and turned off the television.

* * *

Leo was now looking at the back of the dojo, but there was no television. His view was also sideways, which was odd. "Where'd the TV go?" he asked vaguely.

"TV?" Was that Casey? Yes, it was.

He heard shifting bodies around him and realized that he was awake and in the real world again. The weight of his body caught up with him and he felt the reality of gravity again.

"You kicked that thing's ass with your brain," April said. "Good work."

He expected to hear Splinter's voice and looked around for him. He was checking Mikey's vitals. Raph jumped to his feet and ran to them. "He is only asleep. Do not worry, Raphael."

Raph's body shuddered as he released his breath. Leo wanted him to know that it was okay. He wouldn't talk about it. He would try to never think about it again, if it helped. But Raph turned away from him, avoiding eye contact and wandered out of the dojo. The echo of the front door slamming followed. Leo knew that it would be days before they saw him again.

"Did we have a red truck?" Leo asked. It seemed important for some reason, although he couldn't quite remember why.

Don sat up stiffly. He'd fallen in a rather uncomfortable position with his arms pinned under his chest. "I think so. Didn't I take off the wheels and Mikey almost swallowed one and then you were all worked up and that's when Raph tried to strangle you? Remember that?"

"No." He didn't want to remember it.

April sat up suddenly with her mouth open in shock. She said loudly, "You all dream about having sex with me!"

"Do not!" Don said, too quickly.

"Do too!" she said, jumping up. "Mikey told me I had to because he didn't want to die a virgin and Leo tried to marry me and then you tried to do something disturbing with a stethoscope…"

"What did Raphie boy do?" Don asked, hoping to deflect the attention away from his own disturbing thought patterns.

Casey was cracking his knuckles at them with the look of a man bent on avenging his woman's honor.

"Oh, please," she said to Casey, pushing his hands to his sides. "It involved a motorcycle and that's all I'll say. I have to pee really badly. Is Mikey okay?"

"That was the first time that line didn't work," Mikey muttered from his pile of blankets.

Everyone in the room laughed except for Casey and Master Splinter.

Splinter's whiskers twitched with relief and he said, "I will lecture you about your lack of logic later. I chose to remain silent on the issue of propriety. How are you feeling, Michelangelo?"

"Like crap. Hey, I can see. Ow. I'm really really really hungry."

Leo would have cried for happiness that his brothers were saved, but instead it seemed more prudent to fall asleep and he slumped over sideways, asleep where he fell.


	15. Chapter 15

_If you are disturbed by Raph's dream imagery, I can assure that you that it has a specific kind of symbolism and I'm hoping my references made it clear. If not, I'll explain it to you in a PM. And then I'll revise it to make it clearer. hehe Well, that's the end. I hope it was okay. I feel like the last scene should have been Leo/ Mikey, but it went Raph/ Mikey and then Raph/ Leo. Don't know why._

It took Mikey a whole fifteen minutes to realize his new position as cherished invalid and he spent the rest of the next day happily ordering April and Don around. Mikey never dared order his father around, but reckoned he could if had the notion. Leo had been asleep since he collapsed in the dojo and Don had lugged him into his bed with Casey and Splinter's help.

"I want more orange juice," Mikey said, holding his glass limply at his side. He couldn't believe his weakness. He couldn't even hold a glass properly.

Casey just stared at him. "What do you want me to do about it?"

"Get me some," he said, redirecting his laser beam of cuteness in Casey's direction.

"Sorry. Don't work on me. I'm not a girl and I didn't bathe with you as a baby."

Mikey let the glass fall and drip orange juice on the floor. "I don't mind. I can't believe I don't hear that thing anymore. And I don't see it. I could see it when my eyes were shut after a while. Where's Raph?" His breathing quickened as he finally realized that Raph was gone and not asleep like Leo. How had he missed that? "Where's Raph? Is he okay? Did he get hurt?"

"Calm down, kid," Casey said. "Raph's… fine wherever he is."

Mikey would have jumped up if he could have moved. "Give me my phone."

He felt Don's hand on his forehead. He tried to look behind him, but it was impossible. "Just rest. I've been calling Raph for hours. He won't answer."

April sat on the floor next to Mikey and sat a plate of cookies and a new glass of orange juice on the coffee table. She handed the empty glass to Don. "I wonder why he's gone."

Mikey said without thinking, "He's embarrassed. He told me so."

"Huh? When?" Casey said, practically jumping out of his seat to steal one of his cookies. "You were about to keel over."

"He told me with his brain. These are good." He made a face that indicated otherwise.

"With his brain?" Don said, wrinkling up his face in horror of Raph's mind.

Mikey bravely swallowed the cookie, baking powder clump and all. "Yeah, after a while it kind of showed us what each other was thinking. But it only showed the bad stuff, of course." They all glanced at each other and Mikey knew they were freaking out. "Don't worry. I won't tell you what he was thinking anyway. It's none of your business. Hope he doesn't tell you what I was thinking." Mikey shivered at the idea.

Don absent mindedly grabbed the full plate and glass and took it back to the kitchen.

April said, "Good thing for you he isn't the most communicative guy in the world."

* * *

Raph watched Leo and Leo watched him back. They were at opposite ends of the bathtub and the water was warm. It dripped steadily out of the faucet between them. A comforting tune to keep them company.

"The beginning was better than the present. It was safer here," Leo said. "It was warm and quiet."

Raph pushed on Leo's feet to make more space for himself. Leo didn't resist at all. "But we aren't brothers," Raph said, watching the water lap against his plastron.

His brother leaned back against the porcelain. The water was always calm when he moved and he rarely broke its surface. Fluid movements. "We're Castor and Pollux."

The water was comforting and Raph slid down, trying to cover his head, but he could never quite shift himself low enough to be covered. He saw red. It was fountaining out of his wrist and blossoming in the water. He couldn't let Leo see this.

He would leave. He would go into the living room and out into the tunnels. But there was nothing but trees. Why was he here again? He wanted to go home. There was no door anywhere. Nothing but the mist and the trees and the ferns. He moved fast, trying to find something. Anything. Someone was behind him. It would be that Shadow that followed him.

Leo took him by the shoulder and turned him around. He pulled his katana and held the blade in his own hand until the blood ran down his fingers. Then he pressed his bleeding palm against Raph's wrist. "I've fixed that now," he said. The blood throbbed out of their veins in sync for once.

Where was he? A brick wall. But not the brick wall in his room. He could have sworn that he was in his own room. The darkness felt familiar, if it ever can. And he was looking at water flowing past.

He was sleeping on the wet old mattress at the emergency station in the tunnels. Raph sat up stiffly, rubbing his cold and clammy arms. Someone should have checked for him here. They were losing their touch. He would make sure to bring it up when he got home.

The deep scab on his wrist had fallen off as he'd slept and now there was a raw gash. Leo's hand. He'd had that dream about the bathtub. He sometimes dreamed that he was sitting in the bathtub with one of his brothers. He never told them about it because he was sure he would get awkward looks and statements of disgust. But it didn't feel dirty to him. It felt peaceful. Like he was in a place where he was meant to be.

Maybe he would head home. If they mentioned what happened in the group dream, then he would take off again. It wasn't up for discussion.

* * *

Mikey was asleep on the couch. Thin. He was so thin. But he was smiling and had a full plate of cookies rising and falling on his stomach and Mr. Bear in the crook of his arm. The television was on, playing an infomercial.

He turned off the TV and put the remote down as quietly as possible. There was enough room for him to sit on the side of the couch and that depressed him.

"What's that?" Mikey asked. He opened his eyes and said, "Raphie! You're alive! Pick me up so I can hug you!"

"I don't think so." Shot him his arrogant face. He'd escaped the Mikey hug attack.

They sat in the silence awhile and Raph wished he hadn't turned off the TV. Mikey said, "Bet your real glad to have that voice out of your head. I sure am. I keep having the TV on because I'm afraid it'll come back, you know." Nervous laugh. Tried to play it off.

And Raph said before thinking, "Don't worry about… that stuff… that you worry about. It doesn't matter that you don't fit into the world. Look around. Is it a place you really want to fit into?"

"Yes," he mouthed silently. He looked away and held his breath for a second. "I try not to care, but it's real hard. It's like… you know… looking inside a store window at something you can't buy. If we knew what that was like. We can't even stand around on street corners looking in windows."

Raph knew where this line of reasoning would lead. To tears. And yup. There were the tears and it didn't help that Mikey's unusually thin face made them even bigger and bluer and sadder. Raph said, "It don't matter. Things'll look better tomorrow. We just got to go on every day. That's all living is. One day at a time. Some days are bad and some days are good, you know."

For some reason Mikey let out a strangled little sob, but he nodded. Raph leaned down to cover him up as he turned over to sleep and the cookies clattered to the floor. He cringed at the bruises that still laced his arms and Mikey cringed as he changed positions. "Today was a good day," he said.

Only Mikey.

* * *

Leo grabbed Miona's warm body out of her crib and held her against his chest, letting her sleepy head rest against his shoulder. "I didn't tell that story right," he said. "I got it all wrong." He glanced at the looming shadow in the corner. He knew it was watching. "Polydeuces wasn't weak. He was better than I could ever be, if he could so readily give up his life for his brother. Without ever questioning why. That's why the creature chose him. Isn't that right, Raph?"

The shadow sighed and stepped into the lamp light that fell through the window. He was hunched over, like a child who had just been caught stealing cookies from the cookie jar.

"How did you find this place?" Leo asked.

His voice was quiet and unusually gruff. "I know how to use a computer. What are you doing here?"

Leo sat down in the rocking chair carefully. "I just wanted to say goodbye. She's going to have a hard life ahead of her."

Raph stood next to the rocking chair, watching them rock. After a while he said, "I wondered what she looked like. This little brat that almost killed Mikey. I was picturing some evil little troll. But she's just a kid."

"Nothing special about her."

"Castor's better than Polydeuces," Raph said, rather more loudly than Leo liked. "He was nice. Pollux was a jerk. All his selfless sacrifice for his brother was just him being too selfish to lose him without going along too. Castor looked out for others."

Leo choked up. He couldn't remember the last time Raph said anything so nice to him. As awkward as it was. He laid Miona back in her crib and she wiggled into a ball. They were quiet for a while, listening to the cars passing by and Miona breathing gently. There was no need to explain things to Raph. He knew they were in sync for once. He wanted to be quiet and enjoy it. He knew the moment wouldn't last long. Their biorhythms would change as soon as they broke out of the moment and they would slip back into their grating paths.

Raph said, "I know we defeated the bad guy and all, but I wish I could have kicked its ass though."

"Yeah, me too," Leo laughed.


End file.
